Is Twitter Any Use?

I love Twitter and can happily spend hours on it.  I visit the site every day for at least a few minutes and I am rather worried that it might be the single biggest thing I do with my time after actually working.  I enjoy reading the amazing range of stuff people put up on it and often laugh out loud.  It is certainly a better source of news and comment than the mainstream media.  I regard it as generally a good thing and I am very happy that it exists.  I follow a couple of thousand people - I know some people regard this is as problem but I find that getting loads of tweets from all over the place is the best way to enjoy it.


But the question is, on top of all these benefits does it actually help me to promote my own writing, such as it is?   It feels like it does.  I put links up to my blog posts and videos and sometimes I get comments about them back.  And when I track my stats I do see a certain amount of traffic coming from Twitter.   But it isn't spectacular.   A link on twitter might generate a dozen views.  I am grateful for anything, but compared to the amount of time I spend on Twitter it is a pretty poor return on the investment.  Of course most of the time I spend on Twitter is entertainment so I can't and indeed don't complain.

The interesting thing is that recently I have posted a few Tweets that have been picked up and retweeted quite widely.  These weren't anything to do with any of my online stuff.  But I wondered if they might have piqued people's curiosity and led to increased traffic to any of my blogs.  I will often follow up their other stuff when someone posts something that I like, so it seemed possible that it would.

The result was disappointing.  It looks like generating activity on Twitter does not lead to any increase in interest in my online stuff.

The implications of this are that becoming well known on Twitter doesn't lead to any particularly good effects for my online presence.  As I said, I don't complain.  If Twitter had simply been a promotional platform I probably wouldn't enjoy it so much.  If it had turned out to be both fun and good promotion that would have been a bonus.

But the fact is that you can only write something good by spending time and concentrating on it.  The idea that time spent on Twitter is anything other than a distraction from doing some real work is a pernicious one.   The reality is that I need to reign in my Twitter time considerably if I want to give my writing projects more attention.  The idea that I need to cultivate my Twitter account as a way for people to discover my writing is a myth.