Twitter is Silly and Wasteful

I heard the comment today that Twitter is silly and wasteful and it's certainly not the first time I've heard it. While I regularly use Twitter and find great benefit from it, I also didn't find myself leaping to publicly defend the social media site or my regular use of it.

I like Twitter. It benefits me in a variety of ways and it helps me make money. In my book, that's a good thing. It has some bad points but it's also a free service so you can't expect much more than what is already provided.

However, none of these points pertain to the notion that it is silly and wasteful. When someone says that it is wasteful, I have to assume they mean a time-waster. This can in fact, be true. Spending hours a day telling people what you're doing or reading about what they're doing is a big time waster for most people. However, this is true about any social media site and not Twitter specifically.

The same can be said regarding the silly comment. Is it silly to post updates to people you may or may not even know in 140 characters or less? Perhaps... I say it all depends on if you have something useful to say or not.

I regularly tweet writing tips from my Twitter account and I find it helps me while also helping others who enjoy reading and following my daily tips. I don't see anything silly or wasteful about that. I also have clients on my Twitter feed that will send me quick messages when a project opens up or an emergency comes through. Isn't email just as quick? This is true, it is but often I get so many email requests in one day that it can take me a while to get to the backlog.

A Twitter message instead is like an instant nudge but without the invasiveness of an instant messenger because you can choose when and if you want to reply back. So these are just a few of the many reasons why I don't think Twitter is silly or wasteful. However, it all depends on how you use it.

My personal opinion is that a large majority of the people who use Twitter are doing so in a silly and wasteful manner. Most who try to use if for business purposes are not doing so properly and only lowering their credibility instead of building it. But this applies to the people who use the service and not to Twitter itself.

Lisa Mason is a freelance writer with a specialty in Internet content and SEO articles and the author of How to Earn a Living Writing for the Internet as well as two poetry anthologies and a how-to poetry book. She has written thousands of articles, hundreds of eBooks and thousands of website pages and related content.