Genesis

I was on the phone with a good friend the other day, talking
about social media and what bothers us most about Twitter. Don’t judge. Isn’t this what you talk with your friends about?

We both had our own unique set of opinions on the
subject. I made an observation,
which turned into a 15-minute rant that my friend labeled, “The Genesis of
Social Media”. The premise of this
was the comparison between today’s “social media expert” with the early “search
engine optimization expert”.
Back in the day, people tried to get their web sites to rank at the top
of Google for words such as, “the”, “ketchup” and “business”. The rationale was, “If I can just get
my web site to rank at the top of Google, I will have the traffic benefit of
millions of daily searches on these keywords.” “If enough visitors click on my link, I will have sales-it’s
just a numbers game.” Of course,
today this is as close to spam as you can get. Completely irrelevant, stupid and pointless all in one! Hence why Google prioritizes relevance
above most other ranking criteria.

That’s why when I see a “social media expert” on Twitter
with 25,371 followers and after careful review, this person is clearly an
idiot, it irks me. It burns me up
inside. I know for a fact that
these “experts” do not have a clue who is following them. It is obvious that they simply ran
several Twitter scams/tools/tricks to attract a large irrelevant following, who
they, in turn blast with countless pre-scheduled tweets selling whatever they
possibly can—it’s a numbers game. Sad
thing is, it probably works, which only encourages this ludicrous behavior. Who
are you following? Do you know
them? Who’s following you? Do
you know them?

When I say, “know”, I mean, do you read their tweets? Are they relevant to you? If not, why don’t you unfollow them? Reduce the noise pollution in your Twitter
feed and I guarantee you’ll enjoy the service a lot more.