Yes, that’s a real book cover, and it’s a real problem. In fact, this is one of many books on the subject of using Twitter for marketing. Just looking at the search results on Amazon for Twitter hurts my eyes.
If you have enough presence on Twitter, you’ll start to notice that a lot of the people who follow you are professional marketing people who have a big user following. If you follow them, you’ll receive a stream of updates on all the ways they believe that you can acquire new followers and make everyone love you and blah blah blah. As strange as it sounds given their invisibility in the real world, marketing types are probably the most overrepresented demographic on Twitter.
I don’t blame them. To them (and really to anyone else who stops and thinks about it), Twitter is a way of directly talking to people in an attempt to exert some sort of influence. In addition to using Twitter to communicate with friends, users post stuff that they think their followers will find interesting. Marketing people recognized this behavior immediately, so they decided to jump onto Twitter and use it to their advantage.
Immediately, the influence of these people can be felt as a massive annoyance to anyone who tries to use Twitter for something aside from acquiring followers. A lot of people send automated direct messages to people who they just started to follow because some marketing shlub made them think it was a good idea. AutoDMs are some of the most annoying things in the world. A lot of the people I communicate with on Twitter, including myself, have a standing policy that if we get autoDMs from your account, we will immediately cease to interact with you.
And that’s not to mention the content that gets sent out by these people. When I tweet a Techgeist article, sure, that’s advertising, but nothing so blatant as “11 Ways to Improve X, Y, and Z,” which always encourages you to go out and buy some book or pay for some service. I can’t imagine that there’s much of an audience for barrages of advertising, yet there are people whose entire Twitter identities is nothing but ads.
In a way, the fact that there are so many books on the subject of Twitter shows just how much more growing Twitter has to do: it’s like the mainstream flocking to the internet has begun again, only this time it’s a flocking to Twitter. I suspect that a few years down the line, we’ll see the marketers begin to recede back into the waters from whence they came, but for now it’s really annoying. Perhaps the most ironic part of all this is that having millions of people proclaiming themselves marketing experts only serves to harm the businesses of those who are actaully good at marketing. Sure, I’d be really interested to learn about marketing on Twitter effectively, but like hell am I going to pay attention to any self-proclaimed guru.
