Twitter’s Latest Move To Kill Unwanted Trends – Good or Bad?
I don’t know how many of you woke up to the news that now one can report a trend on twitter as either spam, or abusive or duplicate or low quality (really) or on the pretext of being irrelevant (to whom?). A friend posted about Twitter’s ‘good move’ on his Facebook which he saw on someone else’s fb timeline who actually saw it on someone else’s timeline who may have discovered it or might have seen on someone else’s timeline, but I lost track by that time. Crazy times, isn’t it?
Personally, I feel it’s really a good move by twitter – should be implemented soon on web & iOS too. I feel bad for being an iOS user. Anyway, I was too bored of seeing these orchestrated trends and same goddamn names tweeting about kickass camera of Oppo one day and then tweeting about the amazing camera of Huawei the next day – because it’s all about the money, honey. But all blah-blah aside, twitter trending business is going no-where. If one doesn’t like it, it will be removed from his or her feed. Keep ranting, keep cleaning.
There could be two good reactions to this move. First, real influencers may start getting their fair share of importance and second, there cannot be a better time to bring commoners into the serious game of brand advocacy. Commoners will replace spammers but in a good way and for a good reason. Imagine the power of this kind of a branded twitter trend where instead of 300 spammers, 1500 real people will put up one real tweet each about a common #tag between a particular time frame. When people like you and me will be able to start a trend on twitter, it will be a gamechanger. We may not be an influencer, but we are real people. What is good with real people is trust. If I will put up a link about a café tomorrow on my Facebook, then few of my friends will actually click that link to check out why I am so excited about it. Even if real people will get paid to write a review of a restaurant, they will write true things about it as for little money they can’t dupe their friends who may actually visit that place on their recommendation. Even if there is no disclosure, it will be okay. For a brand, though paid, it will still be earned media.
I messaged Ashutosh Harbola of Buzzoka and Rohit Khanna of Eleve for their comment on this latest update. Ashutosh replied saying, “We at Buzzoka have always tried to convince our clients that Twitter Trends were just part of Hype Marketing and not Influencer Marketing and finally Twitter nailed it. Good initiative. This is about to kill 75% market of Influencer Marketing which was led by Twitter Handlers and real influencers will be duly credited now. Glad that Buzzoka could forecast the true format of Influencer Ecosystem.”
Rohit hasn’t been able to reply so far, but I will make sure to update this section once I receive a reply from him.
I usually don’t throw in any data just like that because very similar to twitter trends they too are made up a lot of times but here’s a quick food for thought (this will make brands really sad). As per mention.com median engagement rate and retweet rate of 700 million tweets that they tracked was 0. Among same 700 million tweets, those with a #tag got lowest engagement and tweets that tagged other people got highest.
(Disclaimer: I am also a co-founder of Buzzoka and have sinned myself in past. Since June 2018, I am full time Chief Editor of www.agencyreporter.com and my sins are different now)