Twitter is a Fad (But Include a Link Anyway)

I’ve been writing this since it was invented: Twitter is a fad. It’s something people try a few times and then abandon as fast as throwing out a candy wrapper. For most internet users… and I mean more than 99%, Twitter is a tool for idle chatting that will never get touched after the initial couple experimental uses.

There are people who Tweet all day every day and yes, it’s an important social media tool for them. Mostly people in that category are in technology and they have people from coast to coast listening to their every move. Guys like Brian Gardner – CEO of Studio Press. Brian tweets sometimes over a hundred times in a day but he is also communicating with a group of hundreds of other industry leaders and pundits and fans.

Other people use Twitter to gain a little more fame or pretend they integrated the latest technology into their daily lives. Right… like Oprah. She wanted to do a showbiz “impress the crowd thing” by bringing Ashton Kutcher onto her show to start her new Oprah Twitter page. Take a look a year and a half later at how Oprah integrated Twitter into Her daily life… hmmm let’s see, she used it on 5 days in the last 7 weeks. I wonder if that was even her tweeting.

Twitter has a very low retention rate. That means a lot of people try it and then leave it in the toybox forever. I’m not the only one saying it. Take a look at this BusinessWeek.com article called (can you guess?) Twitter is a Fad. Looks like the InternetNews.com has the same idea.

So now the real reason for this article. Ahhhhh !!!! I just did a search on Google and I was served a results page where ranking in at #2, #3, and #4 were tweets from unreliable “garbage” sources… “Twitter Trash“. Wow. Now why would I as a researcher want garbage results from an unidentified 18 year old with a twitter page taking up positions #2, #3, and #4 on a search engine results page? I would not is the answer. Then why is it happening? Google tests all kinds of stuff and I hope this is just a test. It would be a real mistake to compromise the quality and reliability Google brought to search with Twitter Trash. And I hope I don’t see it again. If I do see it again it’s a bad mistake on the part of the new kid running his own company – Larry Page. Please Google, Twitt away on you own personal time and leave the Twitter Trash out of our important research.

Since Twitter associations are apparently becoming part of the Google Algorithm, and because Oprah and a lot of SEO pundits are trying to create ways for them all to still have jobs, I have Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn icons on my website. I make them for all my clients now too. I tell them they will probably never use them, they will probably never get a job or a lead from them, but they look nice and Google wants them because they are playing with fads now.