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Monday, November 10, 2014

Ravings



I was tempted to call this post "Twitterings" but it thought it might be too hypocritical since I've been making my own ventures into spouting wisdom in 140 characters or less. And in all fairness, ravings take place on all parts of the Internet, not just Twitter. It's just seems to be a fire hose to drink them from.

I confess, I have never paid much attention to Twitter or how it works up until a few weeks ago and I was forced to try and understand as part of my job. I had basically relied on Facebook posts to repost on Twitter when I had made a new post on Dizgraceland. And I assumed the lack of attention I received on Twitter was due to the short attention spans of people rather than the fact that I only had 40 followers. And only two or three of them actually were following me because they were aware of my blog.

After reading a book about social media marketing, I finally realized that in order to get attention on Twitter, you actually have to have more than 40 followers. It is nothing like Facebook where you are actually trying to communicate with people you know and sort of like. Twitter requires volume.



I mentioned in my last post that I had discovered Twifriends and in a matter of days my number of follwers grew tenfold. But in order to do so, I had to follow almost double that many people. And that's when I truly discovered the incredible amount of stark raving mad ravings there are out there. Case in point Amanda Bynes. I was only vaguely aware of Amanda Bynes until I stumbled across one of her posts retweeted by someone I was following. I thought, this can't be real, so I followed her.

I'd read about Amanda Bynes occasionally on various tabloid sites before. I am vaguely aware of her films. But I was truly blown away at the volume of incoherent tweets she posts. Either she has a lunatic publicist and a room full of interns tweeting drivel throughout the day or this person's cheese has fallen off a whole crate of crackers. She has 3.52 million followers! And yes, I am looking at the Twitter verified account for Amanda Bynes.

She posts gems like "Adolf Hilter tricked the germans into believing that jews were less than the germans and that they should be segregated and then killed." This is followed by "But germans who feel that Adolf Hilter was incorrect aren't guilty in my book."

Okay, I know she has been through rehab and obviously has issues, but 3.52 million people read this drivel? By comparison, Huffington Post, one of the top read blogs, has 4.82 million followers. Dalai Lama Quotes only garners 213,000 followers.

It only goes to show you that a majority of people would rather watch (or read) a train wreck than hear about world peace. Sigh.


2 comments:

The random ramblings of a magpie mind said...

This made me chuckle! I confess to using Twitter a great deal; but would like to think my ramblings are not as likely to get me sectioned as some! I love the absolute gems you can uncover; and yes, there are too some strange and unhinged... But I think this is what makes Twitter what it is.

liz young said...

They tell me I should get to grips with Twitter too. Like you, I only link it to my blog. Your opinion of it doesn't fill me with enthusiasm to have a closer look!