For those of you who are avid Twitter users, the following paragraph will be old news: once you join Twitter, you notice how many Followers others have. People you have never heard of, and who seemingly have very little to offer, will have tens of thousands of followers. How come you have so few?
Soon after, you will notice many different services offering various methods to attain more followers. Some are paid, some are free, most will access your account and just end up annoying those who already follow you. So you can try various methods: add more followers and hope they add you back, create interesting content and hope people notice you, Retweet (RT – learn the lingo) what popular people have been saying, write back to the popular users hoping they’ll notice you, and several others.
The interesting fact here is that you find many others doing the same thing: seeking more and more eyeballs, seemingly forgetting that this is a means to and end, rather than and end in itself. If you’re Guy Kawasaki or Kim Kardashian you may get paid to tweet (they do, for promoting certain products), but if you’re trying to promote yourself, your business, or a certain product, is sheer number of followers going to make the difference? And keep in mind that all those users you are getting to follow you are merely trying to promote themselves, their business or a certain product like you are.
So what does a dog-headed accumulation of something like users as and end in itself lead to? Well, possibly a Twitter bubble. If this starts happening enough, what will stop people with many different followers from finding a way to wholesale their followers to the highest bidder? At that point mere accumulation of followers will make more and more sense as a goal. More people will start doing it, until the whole system comes crashing down on itself.
Will this spell an end to Twitter itself? It’s hard to tell, but if you are a Twitter user, look out for the tell-tale signs. Things could get interesting, if nothing else to witness the first Social Media platform bubble and all its odd machinations.
Buzz update: Almost overnight, Google’s Buzz has been taking peoples’ accounts by storm. Could the same happen here? Could it happen before Twitter? It is obviously too early to tell, but there are already some people (see Gary Vaynerchuk) who are using it to reach hundreds of fans. We’ll keep an eye out.
Reminder: In the interest of perpetuating a possible Twitter bubble, feel free to follow us @DumbAgent
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