Why social media sometimes does more harm than good…
I rambled on this topic yesterday on Twitter, but since I ramble about a lot of things, this topic passed through the stream pretty fast. Summing up, the changes to Twitter's RT system have made cross-promotion more difficult for indies, while making it easier for cliques to either promote themselves or to shut others out who don't share their same interests. The problem is Twitter, though, and not the actions of the users.
Giving brief anecdotal examples, when I'm online all day, I'll see someone RT something I tweet or retweet, and many times, it's not even people following me. They just saw my tweet in the general timeline and sent it along. It might be a one-line joke, or several tweets strung together in a ramble. Or it might be a news story from someone else that I was passing along. So if I sit here all day and watch those little user portraits changing, I can confirm that several people are RTing links, and that the people of Twitter are doing their part. The key point is, I only see it if I sit on top of my stream like an owl watching for a mouse to come popping out of its hole.
But let's say that I've published a new book, and I post a link and then leave for a nice dinner with hubby to celebrate. And let's say that five authors also RT that link in the time I was gone. When I come back, all I see is the one RT. I don't know who to thank, or who to make a note of later so I can promote their stuff in return. The only way I could know that is by being here 100% of the time, and that's not how Twitter is supposed to work. People check in when they want, and they ought to be able to see when other people retweeted their stuff.
I'm a die-hard Twitter junkie, and if I can miss stuff like this, you can be sure authors who only check in for an hour or two are also missing out on who retweeted what. So even if they're committed to cross-promotion and reciprocating retweets, they can't know who to retweet anymore. This isn't authors behaving badly. It's twitter cutting off their ability to keep track of their follower's activities. And if this is a problem for authors, its even more so a problem for the casual user who only checks the most recent tweets and mentions before checking back out.
The new RT system is just like the new timeline on Facebook. The change means a streamlined interface with less updates, which sounds good in theory, but which is shutting out many music apps that used to generate promotions for indie artists. Traffic is dying on those apps as a result of the new timeline, and musicians are getting less attention from their fans. Why? Because Facebook made these changes without considering who it would effect. This new design is somehow seen as more efficient, and so even if it's more harmful to the artists relying on it for promotions, it doesn't matter.
Who benefits from these changes? Cliques. Why? Because members of a clique will got to their friend's pages, scroll down through their tweet stream or status updates, find the links that their friends wanted promoted, and then share or retweet those links. They put more effort into helping their friends because they know their friends will also scratch their backs and return the favor. Which is not to say the cliques are evil. They're just more willing to put in extra effort for people they already know. Think of it as wind tunnel promotion.
What this means is that the average user who just checks the first few pages of their timeline will miss out on most of the news items their favorite artists were posting. Those average users will not be able to share the news and help it spread, because they don't think to got to each fan page or individual timeline. That's too much work, and anyway, isn't it all supposed to be in their main page? No, not anymore, but you certainly can't blame the user for not noticing how there's less and less updates from the artists.
I'm not on Facebook now, so I can't even begin to suggest how to fix it. But on Twitter, we need changes to the RT system so that every RT can be tracked, instead of being lumped into one tweet with no way to tell who else passed it along. We need to have tweets like the old system, but perhaps with Twitter not counting the characters in the user name against the 140 character limit.
But in any case, as the social media apps run right now, they aren't helping with promotion. Instead, they're making promotion that much harder for legitimate artists, while doing nothing about the constant floods of spam. Somehow, we need to give artists the chance to hawk their wares and see who is helping with cross-promotion. After all, they can't return the favor if they don't know who was helping them in the first place.
