A few years ago getting heard on Twitter was easy. When I first joined there were only hundreds of thousand of users and it was easy to find friends with common interests and it was even possible for a couple of friend to create a trending topic. (I have fond memories of seeing #FuckOffJeffHoon reach the Twitter homepage)
There are now over 70 million Twitter users sending 50 million Tweets a day and, lets face it, the vast majority of them are un-interesting celebrity RTs, promises of making a fortune working-from-home, and calls for you to click on distracting links that don’t really help any of us produce anything of any real value. It’s great entertainment but I’m not convinced anyone is making any real money on Twitter (except of course the people who will promise you that they can help make you money on Twitter).
With all those millions of daily tweets if you really want to get on top of Twitter, you need to pay someone. You either need fork out on a huge Twotnet of Indonesian Mechanical Turkers to RT variations om everything you say or you need to pay for ‘Promotional Tweets’.
Earlier this week a search for Toy Story 3′ showed tweets by Disney/Pixar right at the top. And matter how many new tweets came in you’d still see Disney’s ‘Promotional Tweet’ right at the top of the pile.
That’s a pretty neat idea from Twitterlabs and, I think, it’s pretty good user experience too (I want to see why something is trending and get to the source of the kerfuffle without having to wade through 1,000s of Tweets asking why ‘Justin Beiber’ is trending).
Well done Twitter. Well done Disney. And well done you if you can afford a promotional Tweet or two.
See the Twitter Help Center for more on ‘Promotional Tweets’.
