Tag Archive: Twitter
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Twitter Games: Can You Spot Them?
Are you being manipulated?
With each new medium of communication, new techniques of advertising have evolved. The consumers may initially be taken in, but eventually they become more savvy and advertisers must lift their game.
This results in a perpetual arms race of sophistication between advertisers and consumers. We laugh at the simplicity of the ads of the 1950s but there is no doubt our grand kids will be laughing at the ads of the 2000’s one day.
We have seen a similar evolution of sophistication on internet advertising. Gone are the days of pop-ups and cheesy rotating banners. The era of social media has ushered in much more subtle ways to manipulate consumers.
Enter Twitter.
With Twitter being such a new medium, many users remain naive of how they are being manipulated – either by individuals or by corporations.
For the most part, the purpose of manipulation tends to be self-glorification; however the techniques can just as easily be used to push a product or opinion.
Could you have spotted them?
Some of the techniques for chasing eyeballs are obvious – some less so.
If you look, you will find examples of them almost every day.
Note: This list avoids the clearly obvious tactics of bots and self-appointed gurus and focuses on more subtle tactics which a user may fail to recognize.
- Use of multiple accounts by a single user to create fake dialogue.
One user confessed to me that in weaker moments, he would have one of his personas attack one of his other personas in order to draw sympathy from his followers!Next time two users get into it, ask yourself: is this a real debate or is it just some guy talking to himself?
- Use of multiple accounts for retweeting
This is most easy to spot when a link is retweeted long after it has grown cold (ie to revive it) or by a low volume user whose sole contribution to Twitter is one or two selective retweets.New users don’t tend to know how to retweet so if the very first tweet of Sally225 is "Must see check it out please retweet!" it’s suspect.
- Product Plug
The most effective product plugs come from users who have created a respectable online following that is not single purpose ie a popular tweeter who is not obviously associated with a company or product. Is the plug genuine or has the user become a shill in a sophisticated online campaign? In the world word-of-mouth advertising, there will be a growing demand for social media influencers who can push a product without being obvious about it.Can you spot the difference between a genuine love of a product versus a paid-for tweet? Not if they are good at it.
- Hashtag pumping
The most brilliant example of Twitter manipulation I’ve seen involved creating a heated debated which was marked by a given hashtag. Then, once the eyeballs arrived and the tag started trending, a link was tweeted with the same hashtag. Smart.If you want people to check out your link but the tag is cold, it will not garner much attention. But if you heat up the tag THEN post your link BOOM. You have an audience ready and waiting. It’s like having an ad on the Good Year blimp during Super Bowl as opposed to flying your blimp over an empty stadium.
Is a tag trending on genuine excitement or is it controversy? Who are the main actors and what are they doing? Watch for it.
At the moment, most of the Twitter games are petty and small scale.
But it’s early days.
Surely advertisers are watching and learning.
Twitter Stats: Bury the Dead
Pareto’s Principal at work on Twitter.
Some Harvard research came out recently which suggested that the Pareto Principal (the 80/20 Rule) is working overtime in Twitter with 10% of users accounting for over 90% of tweets:
But their criteria for user was anyone who had signed up. Twenty percent of them didn’t even have a single follower.
The fact is that loads of people dip their toe into the twitter pool and decide the water is too cold. They join and quit in droves.
I re-ran the experiment looking at a sample of the last 1000 tweets from the people I follow. I regularly prune dormant users so the vast majority of the 350 may be considered active ie they have tweeted at least once in the past month. 200 of them were represented in my 1000 tweet sample.
The distribution curve of tweet contributions looks much less skewed than above. In fact Pareto’s Principal looks well on track with 24% of users account for 79% of tweets:
It’s worth noting that while 40% of those I follow did not contribute a tweet, the next third (33%) contributed 3 tweets or less.
The weakness of this analysis is, of course, my sample may not be representative. I may have a bias to unfollow hyperactive tweeters with a high “follow cost” (ie they are noisy and take up a lot of bandwidth).
So which view is most accurate? The truth probably lies somewhere in between the two.
Suffice to say the Twitter dead should be buried before doing a census.
My Twitter Follow Manifesto
Parsing a few thots
Disclaimer: My thoughts on Twitter are evolving as fast as my English skills are devolving. So my views will surely change but in the meantime my ability to express them may disappear.
Condensing every thot in2 140 chars iz takin its toll.
My Follow Policy
- I follow people who tweet content interesting to me.
- I don’t auto-follow
- When someone follows me I will try to check out their profile within a few days to decide whether to manually follow them back.
- I follow people I know in the real world.
- I am more likely to follow people based in Singapore or around SE Asia.
- I will follow people I’ve had discussions with on Twitter.
- Profiles which include descriptions like SEO guru, marketing maven, etc are usually a turn off.
- Receiving an auto-direct message upon following someone is a pet peeve. I haven’t unfollowed anyone for that yet but the day will come…
What’s Interesting To Me
Singapore news, genetics, evolution, sexual selection, science & technology, forensic science, justice, police brutality, low carb & paleo living, intermittent fasting, cooking, dining, medicine, drugs, health, epidemiology, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cholesterol, Alzheimer’s, BSE, insulin resistance, early Christianity, Christian fundamentalism, rationalism, peak oil, biofuels, animal intelligence, cuteoverload, web design, rss, javascript, php, css, bookmarklets, internet memes, humor, witty writing and meaningful quotes.
My Dream Twitter-RSS-Linkshare App
With whipped cream and a cherry on top…
The new Digg toolbar is warm. Hoot Suit is warmer.
But what I want in an all singing and dancing link sharing service is the following:
- A bookmarklet which:
- Creates a short URL
- Can forward it to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed (whatever) with additional text. Duh.
- Enables tagging
- Allows an additional comment which will appear in the URL header bar (see below).
- The short URL forwards to a framed page (like BigTweet) with the following info in the header:
- Rate or Like
- Retweet
- My comment
- Comment / Discuss button.
- The comment button will expand the frame to reveal a discussion page for all those who clicked through from my link (ie my own personal Reddit).
- A homepage with
- A list of all my shared links including their tags, click count, rating and link to comments
- RSS enabled so anyone can subscribe to all my shared links or a subset for a given tag
- Historic stats for clicks and comments
I think that would do it for now.
Why?
- I want to collect stats on all the links I share because I’m anal like that.
- I have a number of friends who would like to follow my shared links via RSS only and in some cases, only certain topics.
- They may also want to discuss some articles but would prefer to do so amongst a small group
PS: I’d pay for this.
Update 9 April:
It looks like Krumlr is trying to provide just this service. I will test it out and report back. No RSS but otherwise it looks like it has most of the bells and whistles I’m looking for.
Horrible design though. It’s just possible they have a color blind designer. This may impede my ability to research the site.
