ok so like... i get worried about leaving twitter or it falling apart because it's been my main source of ~Online Engagement~ for plugging my art and my cool things i do and my various crowdfund efforts. for years now that's been the case. but then i read some stuff about internal twitter reporting:
Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged... These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled 'Where did the Tweeters Go?'
A 'heavy tweeter' is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
really? that's the criteria for a heavy tweeter?? that's nothing compared to the importance of this shit i've got built up in my head. i hate being on twitter but i used to tell myself it was worth it for like, the exposure or whatever. what exposure?? barely anyone's using it lol. i used to enjoy it, met some great people there, but now i don't. seems like i'm not alone
it's always been a bit of a cesspool but it didn't used to be this bad. and now people are finally getting sick of it. but now i don't have to worry about it since it seems like twitter wasn't that huge of a deal anyway.
i'm realizing now that word of mouth has always gotten me further than any tweet i ever made. luckily that works on all platforms
I had (still kind of have?) the same worry about losing twitter as the source of engagement online, but "engagement" without "conversion" is useless. I recently saw someone that got their tweet to go viral post a screenshot of the stats and...
Almost a million people saw the tweet and only one new follower.
If your goal is to have a lot of people see your shitposts, then sure, twitter can help. But if you want to actually grow an audience, if you want people to follow you, your art, buy your stuff, fund your projects... Having a big audience on twitter is probably not going to be the most efficient way.
Word of mouth is still the most effective thing. It's just slower, and harder to quantify and manipulate. I wish our capitalist hellscape allowed us to be in less of a hurry to grow an audience and share our art.

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