Twitter is useless

I’m sick of being told that I should be on Twitter, or follow people on Twitter, or have a Twitter account or two. It’s been going on for about 10 years now and I’m sick of it, so please leave me alone to enjoy my real world in peace. 
There are many reasons I choose to avoid it. I’m not going to list them here, and I’m not trying to convert anyone away from their social media obsessions (which would be a futile pursuit anyway) but please let me just share these three:

Lots of business owners I know say things like “You HAVE to be on Twitter when you’re a businessman,” or “My company wouldn’t exist without an online presence,” or “There’s no point starting a business unless you also start a business Twitter account.” But when I ask them if they’ve ever had one bit of work come in that came to them exclusively because of their Twitter dealings they stare at me blankly and say “That’s not the point.”

When I worked at the other supermarket, one of my colleagues spent ages trying to convince me to ‘give it a go.’ I asked him to explain how it worked and he said “People can find you and ‘follow’ you and then you can ‘follow’ them back. You update your ‘feed’ as often as you like and anyone who follows you gets to read it IMMEDIATELY and INSTANTLY.”
I said “Wow. Immediately AND instantly? That’s amazing. Where are these followers then?”
He said “Everywhere. They could, literally, be anyone from anywhere.”
“So one of them could be a trainee suicide bomber in a terrorist cell in Pakistan who is reading your messages as a way of determining whether you’re a worthwhile target when he launches his one-man war against the West?”
He said “Well ,technically, he could be, yes.”
“But if someone like that was following you in real life you wouldn’t ‘follow’ them back, you’d get an injunction against them.”
He stared at me blankly and said “That’s not the point.”

A few years ago, I finally caved in and decided to at least give this thing a look. One of my fellow managers was convinced that if I saw this magic happening before my eyes I would fall in love with it and agree with him that it was the best thing since sliced bread (decent sliced bread, that is, not the cheapy awful own-brand crap we were selling at the time for 80p a loaf.)
So I spent a dreary lunch break in the managers office where he insisted on showing me his ‘Twit-feed.’ It just struck me as a confusing, chaotic mess. Every two seconds, thirty new messages would appear on the screen, only to be replaced by thirty more before I’d even managed to read three words of the first one. While my eyes tried to adjust to this vertical barrage of literature, he proudly pointed to the bit in the corner that told me he had “1,900 followers”
I said “What exactly does that mean?”
He said “Every time I put out a tweet, it gets read by 1,900 people.”
I said “No offence, mate, but how the Hell have you got to 1,900 followers?”
“Oh there are certain hashtags you can use that make people automatically follow you.”
“Even if they don’t know who you are? Or agree with anything you say? Or have any shared common interests beyond this website?”
“That’s right”
“Well why on Earth would you want them to do that?”
He said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “to get to 1,900 followers.”
While this conversation had been taking place, approximately 32,000 tweets had appeared briefly on the screen before scrolling themselves away into nothingness.
I said “So you sit on this thing and you read the messages from 1,900 people do you?”
He said “Good God, no. There isn’t time to keep up with them all.”
So I said “Then what on Earth makes you think any of them are reading anything that you write? When you tell me you have ‘1,900 followers’ what you mean is ‘1,900 people that ignore my tweets.’ So what exactly is the point of doing it?”
He stared at me blankly and said “**** off, Ches, you Luddite.”

Case closed. 

RC 26-7-16