Des­pite being act­ive on Twit­ter for just over a year now, I’m start­ing to feel that it’s not the social media site for me or my busi­ness and as such, to test this the­ory out; I’ve decided to see if I miss it and kill my Twit­ter activ­ity for a period of a month by way of an experiment.

In doing so I’m expect­ing to go through vari­ous stages of ‘cold tur­key’ which will no doubt include addic­tion with­drawal symp­toms that will start to mani­fest them­selves once I start to res­ist strong urges to ‘check-in’ to see what people are ‘talk­ing about’, the com­pel­ling desire to ‘share a link’ with my fol­low­ers or per­haps tweet what’s on my mind at any par­tic­u­lar time of the day, or per­haps announce what my plans are for the fol­low­ing day.

You know what it’s like I’m sure!

Now before you start get­ting on your high horse pro­claim­ing that per­haps ‘I don’t get it’ or I’m deploy­ing the ‘wrong strategies’ or even that I’m not enga­ging people enough nor under­stand what Twit­ter is; hear me out.

Get­ting a Return

The primary reason I’ve decided to even enter­tain the idea of junk­ing Twit­ter alto­gether is that I feel it takes up a lot of time, brain power and atten­tion for what seems to me, very little return when it comes to busi­ness gen­er­a­tion or even build­ing an effect­ive net­work of people that can help me build my business.

A harsh opin­ion to digest I know for you Twit­terphiles, but that’s my observation.

Use the Right Tools Then!

Yes I use all the right tools to man­age my account; firstly Tweet­deck when I first got going and more recently, Hoot­suite. Both are very power­ful Twit­ter cli­ents to use in their own right when using a desktop or laptop com­puter, whilst Über­T­wit­ter does a ster­ling job of help­ing me keep me in touch with my fol­low­ers whilst I’m about and about on my Blackberry.

It’s fair to say that I’m an advanced “sharer” with Hootsuite’s RSS feed dis­tri­bu­tion fea­ture (and before that Ping.FM and Twit­ter­feed) help­ing me to eas­ily auto­mate the shar­ing of links, blog posts and the art­icles that I flag up or want to share through my Google Reader account.

Trust me — I know what I’m doing when it comes to using Twit­ter and have passed on this know­ledge through the deliv­ery of a num­ber of work­shops on the sub­ject. So it can be said I’m all tooled up.

Fol­low the Right People Then!

I hear what you’re say­ing and it’s a good point! How­ever to be fair I’m fussy about who I fol­low and have inves­ted time seek­ing out and search­ing for the right people to fol­low which includes people in my loc­al­ity, people I’ve actu­ally phys­ic­ally met (remem­ber doing that?) through real-world busi­ness net­work­ing activ­it­ies with people I feel may be inter­ested in my ser­vices. Reg­u­lar read­ers of my blog will know that I’m on to my second Twit­ter account hav­ing decided to kill my ori­ginal one due to excess­ive ‘noise’ and untar­geted fol­low­ers. (Read the rel­ev­ant post). So you can tell I’m keen.

How­ever the prob­lem is this: Twit­ter seems to be gen­er­ally pop­u­lated with very small or very young busi­nesses in my book. The lar­ger ones that are on there don’t inter­act on a per­sonal level (which defeats the object­ive of Twit­ter for me) and are more con­cerned with “build­ing their brand” rather than enga­ging with folk. The smal­ler and younger ones, whilst happy to engage, are gen­er­ally lim­ited on their budgets or simply don’t under­stand what I can do for them. Either way, they are happy to engage and share know­ledge with me, but when it comes to get­ting their cheque book out. Per­haps not!

Who Cur­rently Uses It?

A quick sur­vey amongst my exist­ing cli­ents, par­tic­u­larly the lar­ger spend­ing ones, indic­ates that Twit­ter plays no part in their daily busi­ness activ­it­ies with many pro­claim­ing a com­plete lack of know­ledge about the micro-blogging site, or even a desire to know any­thing about it altogether!

So if by enlarge, my cur­rent cli­ents aren’t using it, then rep­lic­at­ing their pro­file to other poten­tial cli­ents, it seems to me that oth­ers won’t be either.

Has Twit­ter had its day? Many would say so.

Irrel­ev­ant Noise

This post is at risk of becom­ing a bit of rant, but hey ho! I’m enjoy­ing myself here so per­haps I should con­sider it to be a thera­peutic exer­cise in pre­par­a­tion for my forth­com­ing cold-turkey experience.

I’m fol­low­ing some ser­i­ous busi­ness people on Twit­ter with many of them act­ive off­line net­work­ers. But there’s only so much news one can take about someone’s tweet by tweet preg­nancy mon­logue from a per­son I’ve never met, the nar­rat­ive of what’s hap­pen­ing on X-Factor or a ‘live’ edi­tion of East­enders, a kick-by-kick account of footy on the tele, which cof­fee house they are meet­ing their mate in, through to a dis­cus­sion about ‘which out­fit to wear’ for a forth­com­ing awards cere­mony. This noise out­weighs the real value of any­thing worth­while or use­ful they may have to say.

There’s only a cer­tain amount of trivia, per­sonal brand build­ing, ‘please visit my site/blog’ and self pro­clam­a­tion that one take. Please, I ask you!

Rela­tion­ship Building

Now you could argue that this ‘noise’ is all part of rela­tion­ship build­ing and yes the voyeur within us all helps make sure such life-streaming activ­ity is addict­ive to a large degree for many and is the glue that forms human rela­tion­ships some would say. Think of gos­sip over the garden-fence, or watch­ing a soap. It’s that sort of psychology.

But if all this amounts to noth­ing when it comes to busi­ness being delivered on the bot­tom line, then it’s all noise. If I want trivia — that’s what Face­book is for.

One Month and Counting

How­ever, des­pite what I’ve said above, we’ll see and report back after my months abstin­ence from Twitter.

So there you have it!

Wish me luck! Gulp!

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Close Encoun­ters of the Artistic Kind
• Work­shop: Become a Twit­ter Superuser
• Work­shop: Twit­ter for Newbies