Stop the Twitter Tease – Tell People What Your Link Is About24 May
When it comes to Twitter, it sometimes seems like it’s all about the clicks – and teasing people into clicking.
We’ve all seen the tweets – “This is unbelievable,” “I’ve never seen this before,” “You’ve got to check this out.” Those are the obvious ones. Others essentially deliver the same theme, with different words: “Some sense remains,” “It’s almost impossible to believe this is a photograph,” “Perfect” or just a word or two that leaves you wondering … and often clicking.
Or these two, just this week, that tried to draw me in: “Why I will never believe that Twitter is a waste of time” or “The man in the brown suit was none other than …” (I didn’t click on the first … the guy in the brown suit was Ronald Reagan – I couldn’t help myself).
All of them desperately seek to get you to click on a link and thereby drive traffic and revenue to a website. Or perhaps it’s not about money at all, but just for the thrill of seeing the traffic go up (easy thrills, yes!).
Before he declared Twitter dead and gave it up, actor James Franco used to just tweet links or links with a short, cryptic phrase – not even giving his followers guidance about what the link would lead to or whether it was worth your time at all. It was James Franco, after all.
What happens? People can’t resist and they click links, falling for it like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football before Lucy pulls it away.
Most often, they find things they really didn’t need to know or something that wasn’t all that unbelievable.
The result of all this clicking? A lot of wasted time, time that could be used for better purposes (choose your purpose).
I must confess I’ve fallen into this trap from time to time (my apologies for my less-than-clear tweets and links).
As Twitter matures, it’s time for users to mature as well. A beginning step would be to give readers enough of a clue in your tweet so they could evaluate whether the link is worth their time.
This will, perhaps, reduce clicks in the short term, but those clicking won’t be wasting their time – and making Twitter a time waster instead of a value add.
