14/5/2014 By Deborah Wroe

Eurovision 2014 broke Twitter records. 5,384, 678 tweets according to @TwitterUK (https://blog.twitter.com/en-gb/2014/five-million-tweets-for-eurovision-2014). That’s a lot of people watching Eurovision and chatting about it. Now doesn’t that just prove how utterly fabulous Eurovision is? And how important a platform Twitter is? Well, no, not really. It just means a lot of noise was created globally over a globally watched event – flip, I wish it did mean more, Eurovision and Twitter are two of my favourite things! The number of Twitter users currently stands at 255 million monthly active users. Now, those of us who have been using it for a while, for business, pleasure or both have seen and continue to see and to welcome changes.

We like the new, more Facebook like look; the new option to pin a tweet to the top; the multiple pics in one tweet option; all most welcome. And we embrace new tweeters joining the conversation, come one, come all. However, there are some real turn offs, some ‘just noise’ trends which are diluting the worth, in our opinion. Remember the film American Pie? The girl, annoyingly (but hilariously) starting all her anecdotes with “this one time, at band camp”….well that’s the phrase I see when I read a tweet saying ‘I posted a photo to Facebook’ followed by ‘I posted a photo to Facebook’, followed by ‘I posted a photo to Facebook’. If I am on Twitter, reading tweets, why would I want to know what is happening on another platform? Those tweets are alienating those followers not on Facebook (and genuinely, there are still quite a lot of people not using Facebook).

You can switch this off very easily by unlinking your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It will also mean no more “This thing is really interesting, no I mean really interesting, this one time I was at band camp and” (link to FB to read rest of story). Ditto…’I liked a Youtube video’. Ditto…’I repinned xxx on Pinterest’. Ditto….’I posted a photo to Instagram’. It is very very easy to link social media accounts, but that doesn’t mean it should be done. If a follower has to leave one social media platform to go to another to see the information you are posting, logic says it’s not relevant on that platform no?

Also, there appears to be a new trend of Hi @atweeter. Now, this one is really rather interesting. For example Hi @atweeter I know – hilarious right! Hi @atweeter thanks, you too What do these mean to anyone other than the person doing the tweeting and the one they have @’d ? Diddly squat, that’s what. If you are tweeting for fun, fine, if you are tweeting for your business, not fun, and not fun for your followers. The point of Twitter for business is to let people know who you are, what you are doing, join in and start conversations, and listen. Picture the scenes from American Pie, the rolling eyes of anyone listening to the “this one time, at band camp”? Think of that before tweeting.