What follows isn't a horror story. It's not even foreboding. Hell, it's not even a sad story depending on how you look at it. It's just...well...a result.
I set up my Twitter account in 2009 when it was still nerdy (yes, that's somehow a hipster one-up). Like most people, my first impression was that it was a complete waste of time, so my account lay in waste for a year or so. Then, like most people who use Twitter, I spent some time building my account. I began following people, they began following me, I began tweeting - and sure enough, hey, Twitter was suddenly useful!
I mention this to our clients often - "You only get out of Twitter what you put into it." To be clear, I'm really not saying anything new here. There are plenty of great articles and studies that support investing time on Twitter. Still, for me, there was no better example of the power of that slightly cartoonish bluebird in the sky than when I ceased to regularly tweet.
Honestly, I'm not even sure how it happened. I used to tweet multiple times a day. I'd hold full conversations with people in the obligatory 140 characters or less. And these conversations were not with just anyone. These were my friends! My Twitter friends. Yes, one of the many huge reasons why Twitter is such a powerful network is that people you've never met suddenly become your go-to source for information: for score updates, for movie recommendations, for the answer to why traffic is so heavy on I-55, for job opportunities, for @Jack's sake! Many of these people even ended up being real-life friends. And why not? The people I tweeted with often shared the same interests, humor and industry as myself. It was only natural that we connected beyond the Internet. This crossed all b2c lines too! I often would go to businesses that I followed on Twitter. It was almost if I had a real, actual friend in the diamond business... or the chocolate-covered pretzel business...and so on.
Then, one day, it all stopped. A busy few weeks around the holidays was how it started. It was a Wednesday when I scrolled through my Twitter stream and realized I had no idea what was going on with my friends and acquaintances. I decided I'd check it again later hoping that something would catch my eye, but nothing did. I attempted a comeback of sorts with a tweet here and there, but I never fell back into that old rhythm. Now I'm engrossed in our own client's social media. My days of Twittering for myself are seemingly done. But I miss all of that info at my fingertips...all of those connections...all of that personal investment seems lost. Of course, not everything was lost. I continue to talk to my friends (perhaps a bit less) and even now I still tweet occasionally, but I've certainly squandered what was once a powerhouse connection-maker. My dear, dear Twitter account has lost all of its Internet juice...and I with it.
Okay, that seems dramatic. I admit it's not really that bad. Twitter is still there for me to tap into. I can go back anytime. And now that I write this, I realize that maybe the worst thing isn't that I've lost a good amount of connectivity and instant knowledge, but that I haven't been able to contribute to the network myself. Maybe the real advantage of Twitter isn't that you get out of it what you put in, but that you get to put something in at all. You get to contribute something that's valued and shared.
That's the difference after all. And it's what what businesses want - their tweets to be valued. I guess the adage still works when I tell clients, "You only get out of Twitter what you put into it". I think what stopping Twitter has taught me is that what you "get" might be a little different than anticipated.
I should probably tweet this.