***This post contains copious twords, if you don’t like that sort of thing or think Janet Street-Porter has a point, do not read on. You have been twarned***
Until recently, the Twitter homepage showed an ever-changing list of all tweets as they happened. It was a roiling mass of unfettered updates and opinions and I quite liked it; it was certainly overwhelming, but it felt a bit like running your fingers through the matrix. Almost everything you could see was utter tosh, but there was always the possibility that you would happen along at just the right time to catch something interesting. It also meant that, even if you only had 3 followers and one of those was your Mum, there was a good chance someone out there would have turned up at just the right time to read your tweet. Sadly, that is no longer the case; the wild beast has been chained and now all you can see is a rolling list of the most popular (retweeted) tweets. That means no-one except your direct followers is listening to you anymore. Whereas before, there was a remote chance your scintillating wit would have been picked up by a stranger and spread, now, if you want to grow your audience, you will have to get smart about it.
Most people approach Twitter the same way; they set up an account, follow Stephen Fry and then start adding all their friends and family. Once they’re settled, they start to pick up recommendations by word of mouth and, in the way of these things, methods have arisen and evolved that make the process easier (no-one designed #hashtags or Follow Friday, they just appeared as the twitterati sought to find a means to sift through the astronomical quantity of data to which they now had access). If you say something interesting every now and again, people will start to follow you and, if you say more interesting things than dull ones, they might stick around. That’s all very well and good and for most people it’s enough, but it isn’t going to get your message to a wider audience very rapidly, or at all. In the panoply of opinions and comment swirling around, yours will almost certainly get missed by almost everyone. You probably don’t think that matters much to you but, if you have budding aspirations towards, for example, journalism, you need to get that blog you’re writing a wider audience.
About once a month or so, Twitter goes off like a rocket and suddenly everyone is tweeting about one topic (this week it was all #nickcleggsfault). This is what twitter is all about and why it is valuable, even though the vast majority of what is written is tosh.
When the right-wing press machine swung into action to target Nick Clegg in a sordid and transparent smear campaign on the morning of the second leaders debate, people were (for the first time in election history) able to respond. Where once the written words would have echoed around the media for ages unrefuted, this time they were quickly subsumed beneath a tide of contempt from individuals on the internet. Those people were always there, it’s just that without a way to come together, no-one knew there was anyone else who thought like them. After a while unopposed, smears tend to stick. Not this time Andy Coulson, not this time.
I have no idea who came up with #nickcleggsfault[1], but I’m fairly sure it won’t have been the likes of you or me. Twitter may be the great leveler, giving us personal access to our celebrities and politicians than ever before, but all tweeters[2] are not created equal. While the majority of tweeters are small fry, like you and I, most of the influence comes from the larger fish; let’s call them Stephens. These people have a disproportionately huge number of followers (1,459,056 at the time of writing for the largest Fry of them all, although I refreshed the page and he’d gained another couple of thousand) and when they tweet, the world listens.
The term “viral” is not used to describe these trends by accident; in order to survive an idea must spread faster than it dies out. It is possible that you or I could achieve that by coming up with something so mind-blowingly brilliant that all of our followers instantly retweet it, but it’s unlikely. What usually happens is that 1 or 2 people repeat what you have said and 1 or 2 of their followers might see it too, but then it fizzles and dies. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your idea wouldn’t have gone viral given the chance, just that it didn’t get enough exposure in the early stages. The same idea retweeted by a Stephen will be picked up by hundreds of thousands of their followers, will quickly gain the momentum to become self sustaining and will trend.
So how do you get your message to a Stephen? Well, not by sending them a direct message, that’s for sure. With 1.5 million followers, the shear volume of messages going in that direction means the chances of yours even being seen is vanishingly small. But Stephens do interact on Twitter, there are people on their following lists that they watch with interest, and that is our route in. Stephens are Twitter hubs, channeling a disproportionately large volume of traffic; you may not get your tweet picked up by a Stephen, or even by a friend of Stephen but you might just get it picked up by some popular blogger that a friend of Stephen follows. If you do that, it might make it all the way up the twitterarchy trunk line to the twoligarch at the top. Once that happens, your idea will be everywhere (although in all likelyhood no-one will know it was yours any more).
Of course, it isn’t that simple; you can’t just find such a person and bombard them with the minutia of your life in the hope they’ll pass it on. You have to actually care about what they say and get involved with their twonversation and you have to work to build a relationship. Once they get to know you, they will start to listen to you too and perhaps they’ll give you the odd RT. Of course, you also still have to be interesting, no amount of tactical twittering is going to get you anywhere if your idea of a fun night is pouring over your photo album of interesting pylons.
I would bet a substantial sum that the majority of trending topics come about this way and that truly spontaneous topics from people with no link to the trunk line are rarer than David Cameron at a Pride festival.
So now you have it, the tools you need to become twinfluencial, just don’t be dull ok?
1. I have since discovered it was a guy called @chickyog and he has ~1.5k followers, def of the “popular blogger” class.
2. Twits? Twats? Many have suggested so.
