Don’t #5 — Time is not a circle
Yes, Twitter may be hell on earth. It may be an example of all that is wrong with the world, and a chance for illiterate neckbeards to harass women from the comfort of their bunk bed — but it does have its plus sides.
I, for one, have found it a great source of information. As long as you know how to parse what you’re seeing, it’s the first place for information on breaking news stories. If you take the time to ensure you follow a wide enough, diverse enough range of people, you can have your eyes opened to perspectives and viewpoints you might have never previously encountered — and if you happen to hold a strong political or social belief, it’s the perfect place to balance it by finding out exactly what the other side is thinking.
Also, there’s footy.
(Football fans can skip the next paragraph, as it’ll all be obvious to you. Non-footy fans can also skip it. Just know that a team won. Spend your time looking at the pretty picture instead).
Last Sunday, Arsenal Football Club, still bruised from the worst start to a season they’ve had in years, faced local rivals Tottenham Hotspur. The game was due to be a tense match — Spurs have overtaken Arsenal in the last few years, regularly finishing above them in the league, but some had suggested that their strengths were one dimensional, and the debate around whether striker Harry Kane would stay with the club may have been causing some internal strife. I was unable to watch the match at the time, but a quick search of the #ARSTOT hashtag around half time gave me the details. 3–1 to Arsenal. Delightful. You can read the report here.
OK, football talk is finished. The important thing to know is that a time-specific event happened, and I was immediately able to get the details from Twitter, followed by various levels of expert and non-expert debate and opinion, should I wish.
I try to keep my Twitter set to ‘latest tweets’ in order to keep up with what’s happening. You can also select ‘Home Tweets’ which tries to do some kind of algorithmic management of what you see, but I find it ends up repeating the same few approved messages.
If sport is of no interest to you, think about something like an awards ceremony or an election. There will be debate and discussion in the lead up to the event, perhaps a running commentary with results while the event is taking place, and then post-event analysis afterwards. If I were to scroll back for hours on my feed, I could compare pre-event predictions with the post-event reality, but the top of my feed should always be showing me the most recent posts, as well as retweets of earlier messages.
So why, on a Tuesday morning, did I see this?
Let’s do a quick analysis of this:
- It’s a promoted tweet. Mirror Football have paid money for this to appear in my feed. I don’t follow Mirror Football, but I did search for #ARSTOT, so I’m probably a fair target.
- It’s a clip recorded before the game. Someone has taken the time to edit this, attach it to a tweet, and post it — presumably before the match took place.
- Someone has then decided to set this up as a promoted tweet, for which they will pay money to place in other people’s feeds. They have then set the time limits for promotion such that the tweet is promoted two days after the match has actually finished.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of more suitable content for them to use. Only a few hours later I had a post-match interview appear. At least that would be valid for a few days, possibly even longer. A quick check of their twitter feed shows that they post just over 10 times an hour (including RTs of other Mirror branded properties), an awful lot of which is prediction or gossip — for example, Cristiano Ronaldo has bought a new car! Former player Paul Scholes had to top up his car with petrol from a jerry can! I also noticed a post-match Jurgen Klopp interview cut into at least 3 separate clips, so they’re perfectly capable of providing multiple posts from one session.
So what’s happening here? Are the ad placements and time periods being bought by someone who doesn’t understand football? Unlikely — I can’t imagine there’s a single person employed by the Mirror team who isn’t a football fan, it doesn’t seem like that kind of publication. I have to assume it’s automated. So where’s the efficiency? Nobody buys yesterday’s newspaper unless it’s got fish and chips in it, so why would you pay to put outdated footage into someone’s feed?
Perhaps the clue lies in that “11–12 posts an hour” stat. I don’t think anyone is doing that by hand, certainly not throughout the day. They’re scheduling a lot of it, and presumably have some automated system that promotes relevant posts to non-followers. I searched for the game and am not following them on the CRE twitter account, so I was fair game for ‘a promoted post about Arsenal vs Tottenham’. The fact that the post was already out of date didn’t matter — you just throw the content at the wall and see what sticks.
The only thing that surprised me was that I hadn’t noticed this much sooner. Why hadn’t I been getting annoyed by this on my personal account? I soon realised why.
I’d already blocked Mirror Football years ago, for being massively irritating in their relentless spamming.
I suppose sometimes, when you’re throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, the problem is that your potential customers get covered in shit.
Don’t is a semi-regular series wherein I wade through Hunter S Thompson’s metaphorical money trench in order to find the positive side. There is no positive side.
