Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I have a problem. It’s Twitter. I have 63,000 followers, but do they really care? They don’t send me presents. They don’t offer me rides on their private planes. They don’t donate to my personal foundation. I feel neglected and mistreated. Plus, Jonah Goldberg has way more followers than I do. What should I do?
Signed,
Not John Podhoretz
Before I address your concerns, Not John, let me say at the outset that I’m a huge fan of Jonah Goldberg’s. In fact, he’s on my list of Top Five Favorite Goldbergs. Right behind Lucianne, Whoopi, Rube, the entire cast of that hilarious ABC show The Goldbergs, Goldberg the professional wrestler, Murray Goldberg (the Canadian e-learning pioneer)………Okay, upon further reflection, Jonah is among my Top Twenty Favorite Goldbergs. The point being that Goldberg-wise, he’s way up there.
I could sugarcoat this, but people generally don’t come here for good news. Or any news, if it can be helped. The hard truth is this: your Twitter followers are your actual followers the way your Facebook friends are your real friends, or “Aunt” Jemima is your mother’s sister. Which is to say, trolls and hate-readers aside, the designation is often pro forma or nominal. And perhaps you should be glad for this. For the very word “follower” connotes creepy death cults. Think of people throughout history who have had real followers. Jim Jones. Charles Manson. Marshall Applewhite. Generally speaking, it doesn’t end well. Unless you consider slaughtering pregnant starlets or dying under a purple shroud in matching Nikes to be a cheery group outing.
But wait, it gets worse. You know these all-important followers that you do have? Who you depend on to validate you and help form your identity? The followers that the followed assume hang on their every word? (I see that as of this writing, you have 63.2 thousand followers, plus the blue check of quasi-celebrity. Congratulations! Twitter finds you important enough to verify your account! Just as they did the account for the American Citizen Services of the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, which only had 12 followers when they got blue-checked.) Well, it turns out that according to a study in which 1.2 billion tweets were scanned by Sysomos, a social-media analytics company, 75 percent of tweets get ignored. More damningly, the study was done in 2009, when tweeting was the hot new thing and there were a lot fewer tweets to neglect.
Likewise, those essential links you tweet out to things you’ve written or read, or that you offer like a robin’s-egg-colored Tiffany box to delight and impress your followers? To help enrich their lives the same way Jim Jones just wanted Peoples Temple members to find a more hospitable climate in the jungles of Guyana? The average click-through rate on those is 1.64 percent—a number that drops precipitously the more “followers” you have. If you have over 10,000 followers, your click-through rate is more like 0.45 percent. So even though you personally have about 63,200 followers—nearly 3,000 more people than the population of Terre Haute—guess how many of them you can expect to click on your expertly curated links? About 284.
But wait again, it gets even worse! That’s assuming that your followers are actual people, not bots. All these numbers presume your followers are technically human. A large presumption, it turns out. I don’t want you to feel like I’m picking on you, since you were vulnerable enough to seek my counsel during this dark night of your social-media soul. So I’ll single out Jonah Goldberg, instead. Not because I don’t like him. (In addition to being my 18th or 19th favorite Goldberg, he’s a longtime friend.) But because I think it’s safe. I just checked his Twitter stats, and with 80.4 thousand tweets to his name, he’s probably too busy tweeting to read this.
The internet likes to measure everything, and so we can now purportedly measure people’s fake followers. Every single public person has them. Some have a lot more than others. But for the purposes of our illustration, we’ll just take a peek at Jonah’s. According to twitteraudit.com, which claims to be able to distinguish human followers from bot followers, 67 percent of Jonah’s followers have birth certificates. They are actual flesh-and-blood human beings, even if they are the kind of human beings who believe it’s acceptable for a man to talk to his couch and who think Battlestar Galactica is a documentary.
I should disclose that I have some suspicions about twitteraudit.com’s accounting. Aside from their methodology being hazy, they say that Jonah’s Twitter account was last audited three years ago, and that 128,573 of his followers are real, while 64,479 are fake. If that’s true, then Jonah had approximately 193,000 followers at the time of the audit. But right now, he has 195,000. There alone, it’s a big stretch to believe that America’s sweetheart and one of our foremost champions of Van Dyke facial hair has only amassed 2,000 more followers in 3 years. Even if Mr. Trump has had some of Jonah’s followers eliminated.
So the math is iffy. But who cares? It’s the internet! Half of everything is unreliable on the internet. Which is why it is utter madness to draw your self-worth from it. I highly recommend doing what I do: telling people not to follow me on Twitter, because I’m not on it. In this era of ceaseless self-promotion, it confuses them so much that it makes them want to follow you. Of course, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, as they say in Bartlett’s. So feel free to tweet out a link to this anti-Twitter column. My metrics guys would really appreciate your non-bot followers’ extra 284 clicks.
Matt,
Down here in Texas, we have a highway department practice which I’ve never been able to figure out or get an explanation that makes sense. Maybe they have the same practice where you live. Whenever a guardrail is damaged, the highway department erects a sign: “GUARDRAIL DAMAGE AHEAD.” Why does the highway department do this and why should I care if the guardrail is damaged? I have no plans to careen off of a guardrail, but in the event that I might want to, should I choose an intact or damaged guardrail? A curious mind wants to know and you’re my last resort.
Robert Haggard
Georgetown, Texas
For part of my childhood and again as an early teenager, I lived in Texas. I don’t remember much about the guardrail situation, since I wasn’t of driving age. I likely had my mind on more important things in the car, like enduring the static-y FM radio of our wheezing Oldsmobile Delta 88, while being subjected to the soft-rock hits of the 1980s. (If I never hear Tears for Fears again, it will be too soon.)
But for many years now, I have lived in a semi-communist state (Maryland), where we have guardrails for show, but where our legislature and law enforcement secretly hope that you careen out-of-control off the road, preferably through a red light or speed camera, so they can extract 100 bucks more of revenue from you after our tax-happy former governor, Martin O’Malley, chased a good chunk of small businesses away.
All of this is to say that I’m no slouch in the despising-inept-local-government department. But here, I think you should thank the great state of Texas for giving you a sign. At Ask Matt Labash, we’re all about safety first. And them telling you the guardrail is damaged is the same as them telling you that somebody else already had an accident there. Personally, I subscribe to airline-crash probability theory, which dictates that if a major airline has just had a fatal crash, you should book your very next flight with them. Since what are the odds that they’re going to have two fatal crashes in short order? The same holds true for guardrails. If I were you and I spied a highway-department-labeled damaged guardrail, I’d steer my car straight for it. What better way to avoid a dangerous accident?
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
