Has Twitter turned morphed from a cutting edge news and information tool into the social media equivalent of the tail that wagged the dog?
That’s the point New York Times writer Jenna Worthman makes in an intriguing essay titled, Valley of the Blahs: How Justin Bieber’s Troubles Exposed Twitter’s Achilles Heel.
According to Worthman, Twitter has rapidly evolved from a service that actually provided information about news into a service where people are trying to make news.
She points to the landslide of Tweets about Justin Bieber’s recent arrest (the one in Miami) as a good example of how non-news is dominating Twitter. She says Twitter users outdid themselves that day in a rush to comment on an event that wasn’t much of a story at all.
But Twitter isn’t really about the most important thing anymore — it stopped being about relevancy a long time ago. Twitter seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another.
Part of the problem, Worthman’s eyes anyways, is that Twitter is a medium where influencers and celebrities not only mingle with the little people, but they actually elevate them, too.
While re-Tweets are pretty sweet all on their own, a re-Tweet from a big-name in your industry, think Phil Ivey or Calvin Ayre, can drive major traffic to small-time web publisher. (It can also act as a pretty sweet ego boost for someone who’s not in business.)
As competition for these high value re-tweets heats up, Twitter is rapidly moving away from its roots as DIY news site.
Worthman is quick to point out that the trend towards attention seeking on Twitter is hardly the end of the social giant.
What she does suggest is that all that extra noise is driving Twitter users into increasingly smaller groups where personal connections may be stronger. While this method of social media management removes some of the noise, and a lot of the fun, it’s definitely got its advantages, especially for casino affiliates.
A highly targeted Twitter audience, perhaps one that’s comprised of your biggest and most loyal players, can be a great way to communicate promotions in a more personal manner than they might be used to. It could also be a pretty good way of collecting feedback from players you know will actually make deposits.
Worthman’s conclusions also don’t prevent anyone from building a Twitter feed that’s packed with high quality, newsworthy Tweets. As they say, “It’s not the singer, it’s the song.”