A Good thing… a FUN thing…
But are people’s posts REALLY being read?
And, therefore, does it REALLY do much good?
I’m in doubt as to the efficacy of Twitter. I see and hear people twittering and tweeting, tweet! tweet! It sounds so pretty, then I realize that the birdies in the trees used to be dinosaurs in an earlier epoch, and these twitters might end up on the KT (Cretaceous-Tertiary) border themselves, if they’re not careful. Yes, we like birdies, I had some excellent fried chicken last night.. Birdies are so numerous, the voices of the cheep cheep twitterers out there.. are like the 70 billion Passenger Pigeons that hung like massive clouds over entire Midewest counties a hundred and thirty years ago.. But where are they, today? The very last survivor that anyone knows of, Martha, I believe her name was, died in the (St. Louis?) Zoo in 1914 or so. I tell you, the same kind of sad fate coul await Twitters, er, twitterers, er tweets, despite, or perhaps because of, all the endless electronic ticker-tape of their messages that cross my monitor every minute! WHO are they kidding? They aren’t READING the tweets their followers send ’em! THERE’S NO WAY someone following 600+ people like I am, could keep track of ALL the tweets crossing the screen every day — no way! So, that being the case, why do we even think there is any chance someone with 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 “followers”, out there, is going to be able to keep track of what’s crossing his monitor, either? NO! Not unless that person is rich enough to hire someone to sit there and monitor and respond intelligently to tweets ALL DAY LONG!
It’s like poetry readings back in the ’60’s and ’70’s, you may not have been born yet, but you didn’t miss much. People would show up, alright! ALL excited — to read THEIR poems! But not very many people there WANTED to listen to their poems, or anybody else’s, they just wante to read THEIR OWN POEMS out loud! THAT, a kind of silly, 140-character-and-space “mini-blog”, is what is really going on!
I will stick with it awhile longer. I have a theory on how I can turn my couple hundred followers into THOUSANDS of followers! But even if I do manage to ever do that —- will my sales go skyrocket? Will my client list choke my appointment book? Nope, because these are not buyers, these are mini-bloggers. People don’t seem to understand that, quite yet! Or, maybe they do, and are working on ways to CHANGE THAT, well, if so, I wish them well! Unless somebody buys something, somewhere, a product or a service, then I don’t feel very much is being accomplished on Twitter. —–e.a.