For those who followed my posts on law professor use of Twitter, I thought this recent article, called "The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting," at The Atlantic was illuminating. The gist of the article was an author's self-study of the rate that users click through to read an article. The results leave a lot of questions about the information sharing value of Twitter, not just for law professors, but for everyone.
As Thompson notes:
Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter. Even so, I thought the sharing economy of the Internet shared a bit more than this.
So, what does this mean for two primary uses of Twitter that I discussed recently, marketing and information sharing?
For marketing, I don't know that much has changed. If the goal is to let people know about your work, then posting on Twitter will do that, regardless of whether people actually read it. Further, the public persona of a tweeter stands separate from that of scholar. Critics of law professors might not like that so much.
As Thompson notes on marketing:
There used to be a vague sense that Twitter drives traffic, and traffic drives renown (or fame, or pride, or whatever word defines the psychic benefit of public recognition). Instead, the truth is that Twitter can drive one sort of renown (there are some people who are Twitter-famous), and traffic affords a different psychic currency. But they are nearly independent variables.
As for information sharing, I think it says a lot, and most of it is not good. First, it says that people on Twitter are often relying on headlines rather than the content underneath. And given that clickbait headlines are designed to make a point, that can't be good for discourse.
From Thompson:
Is the social web just a matrix of empty shares, of hollow generosity? As Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile once said (on Twitter), there is "effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." People read without sharing, but just as often, perhaps, they share without reading.
When I graphed my 100 most popular tweets by clicks and engagement [that is, retweets, favorites, and replies], the result is a jagged mess. Many of my most engaged tweets barely generated any clicks. Readers treated the URL in the tweet as a footnote. Some tweets, you might say, are "too good to click": They offer such a complete story that it leaves no curious itch.
The second point of information sharing is that perhaps I had the metric backward in my study by valuing links over commentary. Because people apparently don't read the underlying sources, it is better to simply summarize and skip the link altogether with those few precious characters. (Side note: not sure how to measure this type of information sharing versus other non-linked text that isn't information sharing.)
Again, Thompson:
It's fair to come away from these metrics thinking that Twitter is worthless. But that's an unsophisticated conclusion. The more sophisticated takeaway is that Twitter is worthless for the limited purpose of driving traffic to your website, because Twitter is not a portal for outbound links, but rather a homepage for self-contained pictures and observations.
But if that's the conclusion, then no wonder I'm down on Twitter. I don't want people's biased takes on underlying information. There's already too much of that today. And I certainly don't want those summaries in 140 characters. As someone who blogs about case law and scholarship on a regular basis, I walk a fine line between overrepresenting what a case or study says and undercrediting its impact. It's hard enough to do that in 800-1000 words. Doing it 140 characters is nearly impossible, though I suppose you can string a few tweets together (as some of my colleagues do).
I don't know where this leaves the enterprise of law professor blogging. I don't plan to change my behavior, especially because I can tweet in the same post that I share on Facebook (where I know my audience and clickthroughs are higher). And I continue to view the information sharing as a service, even if only 1% of the readers are listening. But I'm not putting my popularity eggs in the Twitter basket anytime soon.
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