Twitter is kind of a big deal. It’s the 15th most visited site on the Internet, has a user base hovering around 200 million, and 65 million tweets are sent per day. Companies use it, celebrities hump it, and ordinary schmoes like you and me transform the achingly mundane into inflated snapshots of what life is really like.
But nobody gives a shit.
Social media analytics company Sysomos looked at 1.2 billion tweets over the past two months and discovered that 71 percent of them received no response. That’s three out of four 140-character blurbs, completely ignored.
Sysomos also found that only 1.53 percent of Twitter “conversations” are three levels deep, meaning even if there are replies, a scant number of users actually want to yak. Also, 85 percent of tweets that get a reply … only get one.
So what does this mean? It means that as we morph the way we interact with one another, we’re simultaneously so disengaged from the process itself that our revolution has become a silly idea. This proves true the adage that social networks are nothing more than throbbing narcissism factories and that we’re so Snuggied up in our own blather we can’t be bothered with anyone else’s.
I find this more funny than sad, but for those who believe their tweets hold any shred of importance, well, I don’t know how to break this to you …
I’m with Silus here :]
The discussion about being so “snuggled up in our own blather we can’t be bothered with anyone else’s” is an important one … it’s a shame that this article doesn’t further that discussion. Perhaps the author doesn’t use Twitter, perhaps the author didn’t think through his premise, or — as is too often the case among media frontliners — the author knew he had nothing, but sacrificed his story on the alter of the sensationalist headline any way. Here’s the scoop: a tweet can have impact whether or not it’s responded to or reposted or favorited (which this article doesn’t even mention). Most… Read more »