buzzbishop
on - last edited on
If you saw the scroll on CNN today or read an article in PC Magazine, you'd think that millions of us are wasting our time everyday putting things into the twitterverse that are pointless.
The headline blares "71% of Tweets Are Ignored." It's a lot sensational and a little misleading. The survey by Sysomos measured some 1.2 billion tweets and the measurement they used to define ignored is retweeted or responded.
I read thousands of tweets a day, I respond to dozens, retweet a few. I crank out probably 40 or so myself and receive a similar amount of interaction. The study, and headline, is flawed in their allegations because not everything demands a response or a retweet.
As I write this @DarrenDreger from TSN is asking "Is Colton Orr on the Leafs bench, or is he hurt from the fight?" He's not asking me, he's asking out loud - posing some insight for fans to think about. No response required, yet the criteria of the study means I've ignored this tweet.
Another person I follow, @MaulerMauler, tweeted out a joke, "Oh no.....one of the miners forgot his house keys down there....." I don't need to respond to that to chuckle inside. Just because I didn't pass it along doesn't mean I've ignored it.
And then there are the links that are passed along through Twitter. @GossipCop is one of my fave sources of sleaze and their update "Robert Pattinson + Kristen Stewart's "voodoo wedding" → http://bit.ly/d5IWtz" was interesting enough for me to click on. I didn't retweet it, but I didn't ignore it.
Truth is, I probably do ignore more than 71% of the tweets in my stream because I don’t see them. Twitter is the worldwide talk show, a constant cocktail party filled with conversations - but life goes on.
When I'm at my son's skating lessons or out for a run Twitter cranks out content that I miss. I don't sit down at the computer to relive everything, I catch up where I can, join where I'm inspired and share what I think is important.
GigaOm has a great discussion of how we use Twitter.
If you stick with just the web interface, you're missing a lot of the conversations. If you break out and use a specific Twitter app (I prefer TweetDeck), then you can harness the power of the various conversations in the Twittersphere, drilling down into topics that matter. You may be ignoring 71% of the content, but the apps let you search and sort for the 29% of content that matters.
You can follow the #yycvote hashtag to monitor election coverage in Calgary. You can follow #glee to see what people are saying about your favourite tv show or you can monitor #miners to watch the number of rescued Chilean miners rise.
To say 71% of Tweets are ignored because they weren't retweeted or responded to is misleading. We all use Twitter in different ways and many of the users are still just figuring out how to integrate yet another news stream into a very distracting landscape of content.
catch the buzz ... pass it on.
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