The Case Against Twitter (Does It Have a Negative Networking Effect?)
By Anna Johnson on January 29th, 2009Search engine optimization (SEO) expert, Aaron Wall, has come out and said what many of us have been quietly thinking for some time: Twitter is NOT the fantastic marketing tool various people would have you believe. What’s more, in my view, it may be getting worse due to a ‘negative networking effect.’
Aaron Wall sets out his criticisms of Twitter on his blog. He indicates that, from an SEO perspective, Twitter is virtually useless in terms of link value. Google, for one, won’t count links posted in tweets or even user profiles, since – according to Aaron – the search engine company pressured Twitter into adopting the ‘no follow’ tag for URLs in tweets and user profiles.
He notes that after recently releasing the free SEO Toolbar – which was downloaded some 10,000 times – out of 21 pages of tweets (300+ tweets) that mentioned ‘SEO Toolbar’, Yahoo displayed fewer than 10 inbound links to the SEO Toolbar page from sources other than direct friend requests, social news sites, or automated links brought on by that exposure.
Even if Twitter is worthless from an SEO perspective it can still be useful for generating traffic, building relationships and responding to customer enquiries, right? Well, having profiled several companies that have used their Twitter channels specifically for some kind of customer relations, I can see the benefit there.
But I worry that, even as various Internet marketers CAN trace optins and sales back to tweets they’ve posted, Twitter has a kind of ‘negative networking effect.’
The ‘networking effect’ is the idea that, as more people use something, the more useful it becomes, which in turn prompts more people to use it. The Internet, email and Google are all great examples of the networking effect.
Twitter is also an example of the networking effect. But, at a certain point, I wonder if Twitter’s networking effect actually becomes negative. Where, the more people using Twitter, the LESS useful it becomes, which in turn prompts fewer people to use it.
If you follow hundreds or thousands of Twitter members… who in turn follow hundreds or thousands of people… you’ll know what I mean. As your followers follow more people… your ability to get YOUR tweet seen by your followers lessens.
Ironically, I disagree with Aaron Wall when he criticises Twitter for being a place where only a tight knit group may see your tweet. He indicates that Twitter is ineffective for mass distributing a message if you only have a small group of followers.
While that may be true, I’m not sure having a small group of followers is necessarily a problem. After all, if your message is directed at that tight knit group of people, who cares if you don’t get mass distribution?
The issue is really having any number of followers who also follow hundreds or thousands of OTHER Twitter members. The greater the number of OTHER people your followers follow… and the MORE everyone tweets… the more likely your message will get washed away in a sea of tweets!
Now, just to clarify, neither Aaron Wall nor I hate Twitter. Aaron regards it as a complimentary channel that can add exposure to a product launch. He simply warns that:
‘if the conversation does not leave Twitter.com then it has quite limited value in a search-driven Google-centric web. And that limited value is even less if you don’t already have thousands of Twitter followers.’
I agree with the idea that the conversation must leave Twitter to have long-standing value. But, as I said above, I don’t regard the number of followers to be the real problem for most Internet marketers. The real problem is the negative networking effect.
Source: Aaron Wall, ” How Twitter Can be Corrosive to Online Marketing,” SEOBook, January 19, 2009
February 14th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Interesting. I’m glad you share my perspective about the problem being that people who follow hundreds or thousands are necessarily ignoring most of them.
You might want to take a look at this post I wrote the other day:
http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/