Would anyone notice if you left Twitter?

Leo Laporte wrote an article this week where he discussed social media as potentially being a bit of a waste of time. He attributed this to the fact that none of his posts on Buzz in August had gone public. And no-one noticed, not even himself. Following on from this he begins to question the time he’s spent on all his social networks, wondering if we’re just basically talking into an echo chamber. It’s an important question to ask, when we spend so much of our time online – would anyone really notice if we weren’t there? And is the return sufficient for what we put in?

Do people notice us?

Asking if anyone would notice if we’re not there is not necessarily a comfortable question to ask. We don’t like to think that we might not be as popular as we thought. We spend a lot of time building our communities and by default we position ourselves at the centre of it. It’s the connections and the stream of content that we’ve built therefore everything goes on around us. If we ask a question, then we expect one or more of our connections to answer. What we don’t like to think is that we go unnoticed. If you didn’t turn up to a party with your friends, there would probably be questions asked. If you didn’t tweet for a week, it’s less likely that someone will notice.

As much as it’s social, social media is centered around one person – you. And something that I’ve still never gotten quite comfortable with, is the amount that we’re subject to judgement, of just how popular/interesting/funny/clever we are. We write a blog post and people see how many comments you got, how many @replies you get, photo views, Likes etc.. It’s changed the whole way we communicate and we put more and more emphasis on how people will react to the content we’re putting out there. The only problem is that the more of us that are creating content, the less time we have to engage with the content out there. It then becomes more about sharing than about engaging. We have to split our time between all the different communities we created, with our different online identities and make time to both create and contribute.

Is social networking really a waste of time?

The answer depends of course on what you’re using it for. If you want to use it to socialise and chat, build social connections, then you use it in that way and get out of it what you will. If you want to use it to source interesting content, build your professional network, find a job, sell something, find an employee, then you use it in the way that best serves your purpose.  It’s hard to think of it as a waste of time, but instead think of it as a new way of communicating. Some might complain about the increasing amount of time we’re spending online (thin Daily Mail etc), but isn’t it better to spend that time talking to others, commenting on blogs etc.. than slumped in front of the TV?

Social media is far from a waste of time. It’s a brand new way to spend our time.

Reaching The Tipping Point

As we all find our way in social media however, we reach an interesting point in the evolution of online communities. Eventually we may reach a point where we all busy shouting, and we’re no longer able to sustain what we’ve built and effectively communicate with each other. As Louis Gray points out, this is a very real risk unless you spend time engaging with your community. And it doesn’t take long before you start to notice the effect. If I’ve had a particularly quiet few days on Twitter, then I’ll get a lot less replies than usual. My normal service resumes, and people start to respond again. I don’t think this is a conscious decision by the user, you simply see more content from someone in your stream so you build you familiarity with them and the conversation follows.

The other tipping point to consider is just how thin we can spread ourselves online. Building a community is one thing, but building it across different sites with a different purpose and functionality is another. There’s plenty of stats on the average followers or friends a user has (130 on Facebook) but less on how these followers cross over from one site to the next. As we explore new sites that are tailored to our interests with a niche functionalty – Formspring, Get Glue etc.. we’re spending more time on creating content that serves each of these sites, perhaps without realising that we’re often talking to the same people. At the end of the day, there isn’t a  huge leap from building a profile on Quora, to asking a question on Twitter or LinkedIn. Yet we invest more time in creating our profiles and the content that keeps those going. There has to be a limit to what we can do.

For the past few years marketers online have followed the 1:9:90 rule – the idea that that 1% of people contribute content, 9% engage with it, and the remaining 90% are lurkers. This might not apply any longer though. For one the creation of content has opened up considerably (uploading a twitpic vs. creating a profile on Flickr or a photoblog) and we now all have a more vested interest in creating content. The profiles we create need to be populated with something. A recent survey in Australia finds that 26% of online aduts that are online, maintain a blog, upload music or a video at least once a month. A definite shift from the previous 1%.

As for Leo Laporte’s argument, you can certainly see where he’s coming from. I think this hints at social media overload more than as a reflection of social media being a waste of time. For me it only works when I focus my attentions on the areas that work best for me – blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Reader. I don’t know if anyone would notice if I left, but I would, and that’s all that matters.