Has the media gone Twitter mad?

@timoncheese has been thinking.

Everywhere I seem to look in the media at the moment, it’s all Twitter Twitter Twitter. On some platforms it even seems to be overtaking ‘texting-in’ as the standard format for audience interactivity. But has the media gone over the top with Twitter?

In the city I currently live in, I have a group of friends and most of them are on Twitter. My girlfriend is on Twitter. Lots of people I know from the media industry are on Twitter. More people join all the time, and I certainly feel that the interaction and wealth of information I get from it makes it seem like the social networking place to be. And it is, at the moment.

But – I’ve recently found myself falling into the trap of thinking that if I put something on Twitter, everyone in my life will know about it. Lots of people will. But they’re mostly people I don’t actually know very well. I went back and thought about how many of the people I really know actively use Twitter, and the answer is very, very few.

Out of all my close friends from my hometown, school and university, a handful are on Twitter. Probably only three or four check it frequently. I don’t know anyone in my family using it. And, amazingly, at work – so this includes all BBC staff producing radio and television output for an entire region (two radio stations and regional TV) – again it’s pretty much just a handful. I would expect and hope that most of my colleagues are on Twitter and know more about it than most because of the industry they work in, but that just isn’t the case.

This got me thinking that perhaps the media have jumped on board what could potentially be nothing more than a passing fad, to the extent that it’s alienating the majority of our audience every time we mention it. Perhaps that goes a bit far, and I really hope that Twitter isn’t a passing fad (nor do I believe it is), but the figures still don’t quite add up for the coverage it’s currently getting.

For me - and I work in the media and use Twitter frequently – it seems to make perfect sense. It’s wonderful and interactive to have all these Twitter mentions all over various media outlets all the time. But apparently I’m one of only a few million UK Twitter users each month.

There seem to be common themes that come out of articles and reports on UK Twitter user-data...that a couple of million UK users log on each month, that the late-teens/early twenties are using it the most, and that the minority tweet the vast majority (here’s one such article). So when you have over 50 million people in the UK listening to the radio and watching TV every single week, it’s clear that most of those people are not on Twitter, and those who are don’t check it that often, and even those who do don’t tweet all too frequently. So really – a teeny tiny minority of media audiences actively fully engage with Twitter.

Before I had the internet (the olden days), I got quite annoyed at TV programmes occasionally telling me that I could find more on their website. I can’t imagine how annoying that still is for the people who still aren’t ‘connected’ today – however it’s understandable and right that the industry pushed the internet in the way it did and still does. However, Twitter isn’t the internet. Is it right that an increasing number of radio shows are going on about Twitter to the extent they do? As a non-Twitter user (the majority of listeners) I think that would make me feel pretty left-out. Perhaps your radio station gets as many ‘@ replies’ or ‘DMs’ on Twitter as it does text messages. That’s beside the point – enough people have mobile phones now that giving out the text number or reading out a text is socially normal, you’re not excluding people (and even then only something like 1% of people ever text their favourite radio station). But if you go on relentlessly about all the tweets you’ve received, you’re excluding everyone who doesn’t use Twitter.

I absolutely love Channel 4 news. I really do. But when it comes to Twitter, they currently spring to mind as culprits of what I’m talking about. They generate some really good content using Twitter and get some great questions from listeners (although, the merits of using listener comments relentlessly is a whole debate of its own...). However, instead of just referencing where they got the questions, they tend to go on and on about Twitter. Twitter this, Twitter that. Lots of big radio stations do it too, and again, while it can provide some great programme content, I think there’s a big difference between using it moderately to get some decent comments, and talking about it all the time, excluding a large percentage of your audience.

Apparently ‘teens don’t tweet’. So why are Radio 1 (target audience 16 – 24) talking about Twitter all the time? I think they’re doing it because they get lots of comments from Twitter, and the majority of the presenters use it widely and so it feels natural to them. They feel obliged (and in most circumstances rightly so) to push the new media agenda. But the majority of their audience listening at any one time will just feel a bit left out by the continuous mention of a social media platform that they’re not on. Even if they feel peer-pressured by the media to join (I have friends who feel like they’re missing out because Chris Moyles keeps mentioning it), I just know they’re not going check Twitter for updates very often, let alone tweet much themselves.

I think there’s a balance to be struck, and at the moment the media is jumping slightly ahead of itself. It’s right that we should push new platforms, be innovative, creative and interactive. But we should try not to do this at the expense of the current audience.

The media needs to be careful not to assume that everyone listening or watching uses Twitter on a regular basis – they don’t.

(Hey, I'm on Twitter: @timoncheese)