Hey, Content Marketers, Let’s See If We Can Ruin Twitter The Way We Ruined Facebook

Let’s hop in our mental time machine and journey all the way back to the ancient days of three years ago. Gas prices were lousy. But it was a golden age for marketers on Facebook.

All you had to do was get people to follow you and they would see every single one of your updates!

It didn’t matter how you got people to like your page–sweepstakes, giveaways, browser viruses. The important thing was they were yours.

Once you had them, all you had to do was start populating their news feed with promotional posts, and clicks would follow. And if a few updates were good, then more were better. In fact, forget a steady stream. You could set up an auto scheduler to shoot out updates like a fire hose.

Then came that fateful day when Facebook changed their algorithm.

Now your updates were only being seen by a tiny fraction of your followers. The evil F suddenly wanted you to pay for all that reach you were used to getting for free.

Corporate greed for sure.

But do you think a teeny part of their reasoning could have been to protect their members from being pummeled by spammy promotion?

Didn’t matter too much, because along came Twitter.

Hundreds of millions of users. Easy to get followers. And every one of them could see your tweets for free. Or they could if you sent each one multiple times a day. You just needed to automate it with a robo-tweeter to send the same message about your site every two minutes.

Using this strategy, you pwned hashtags like #growthhacking and #opportunity.

Unfortunately, Twitter countered this tactic by introducing the Relevant feed, which has now become the Top tweets feed. Hey, how come none of your tweets ever show up there?

We inbound traffic hackers haven’t ruined Twitter yet. But if we can just keep doing what we’re doing, and maybe go from giving it 110% to giving it 120%, we can do it. We can force them into the Facebook model of drip-feeding to our followers.

History is on our side.

Back in the 1950s, Vicinity Marketing Hackers (sometimes called door-to-door salesmen) forced our grandparents to get No Soliciting signs.

Throughout the 1980s, Voice Sales Hackers (sometimes called telemarketers) were such a nuisance, Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 and later set up the National Do Not Call Registry and severely curtailed the phone sales industry.

In the 1990s, Inbox Hacking (sometimes called SPAM) led to the Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, effectively taking all the fun out of email marketing.

By 2020 expect a federal Social Media Abuse Czar to monitor all communications platforms for unauthorized marketing.

But who cares?

We’ll be sharing Handbills-Tucked-Under-Wiper-Blades-In-Grocery-Store-Parking-Lots marketing tips on our CB radios.