BANGKOK POST: HOW NOT TO USE TWITTER
The Bangkok Post is annoying and losing many of its followers on Twitter.
In the past 36 hours it has lost more than 120 'followers' due to what is dubbed flooding - sending our numerous Twitter updates (tweets) in a short space of time. This morning alone @Bangkok_Post has published several hundred updates, some of which are duplicated. Some of the comments from followers include:
"pls stop doing what u'r doing u've become a twitter spammer."
"unfollowing unless you stop putting out updates every 30 seconds."
"See you again when you fix this pointless tweet spamming."
"If someone is in the Klong Toey area, can you please go to @Bangkok_Post and tell them they have a Twitter problem, please?"
"That's it! I can't take this anymore. Don't you know how to use social network!!!!!!!!!!"
Clearly The Bangkok Post has a problem. My guess would be they've unsuccessfully tried to automate their publishing operation with Twitter. I cannot imagine for a second that a human is responsible for all these updates.
But whatever is happening it's impacting on the image, reputation and readership of the newspaper. I know I have some readers who work for Post Publishing and I hope they are able to sort this problem, soon.
6 comments:
Another issue with the Bangkok Post's tweets is the unwarranted use of the breakingnews hash tag. I've seen quite a few complaints about that.
Basically, they're using it on just about every story. Some deputy minister blows his nose and it's breaking news.
The tag should only be used for earth-shattering, high-impact events that are truly breaking -- never before heard of. A loan deal, bus leases, ongoing stories, etc. are not breaking news.
With the doubling up and flooding of tweets, I suspect what the Post did was sign up for duplicate feed automation services. Perhaps not everyone in the IT department is speaking to each other. Maybe the IT department isn't even involved and nobody knows who is responsible for managing the paper's presence on Twitter. One person to do that should be enough.
This doesn't surprise me given the standard of the newspaper.
The reason I like Twitter is because I can follow the messages of real people/blogs who are interesting and have something to say. It's unlikely the Post would have anything relevant to say in a Twitter feed (because the standard is so low) whereas I would follow someone like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times because he's not just using Twitter to copy what's been published in his column.
I follow the news items from the Bangkok Post via Google Reader, contained in an RSS feed. That way you can skip through the news items very quickly via keyboard shortcuts.
Looking at one tweet from @Bangkok_Post regarding the Canadian elections. This has been published 52 times between 11pm last night at 12.40pm today. They're re-tweeting the same dozen or so stories all the time, so 52 x 10 is a lot of tweets in 13 hours - and many reasons for their followers (readers) to get annoyed.
And tweeting exactly what appears on their RSS Feeds kinda shows they don't understand social media at all.
I am only using the RSS feeds, but those suck as well. As for the general news I get my updates locally here, I only want the Thailand-related things in the feed(s). But e.g. the news channel has international sports, international news mixed with local Thailand news, and right now the Top Stories feed has three times the flu cases and two times the bonds.
But - the feed of the The Nation isn't better, but actually even worse - often only contain the title and no text, and duplicates as well. I even tried to built a filter on Yahoo Pipes to eliminate some of the duplicates to make it at least usable.
I'm another one who stopped getting their updates.
Have they improved any since then?
Catherine,
Seems to be back to normal this morning .. three updates in the last hour seems reasonable.
They also appear to have got all their followers back. The number has returned to the level it was before the 'avalanche'.
Post a Comment