Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Twitter Payoff: The Ideas of Liberty vs. The Mainstream

By Chris Rossini

Last month, I wrote a piece called "How To Use Twitter To Spread The Ideas of Liberty". I explained how the analytics tools that Twitter provides free to everyone, can be used to gauge how well you're doing at reaching people with libertarian ideas.

Well, I read a piece in the government cheerleader publication called The Atlantic, and the writer, Derek Thompson, is complaining. He uses Twitter (and the very same analytics tools) but doesn't see the payoff for him and his employer.

Thompson tweeted an article of his, and the tweet was viewed 155,000 times. However only 1% interacted with it and clicked through to the article. Thompson is not happy about that 1%. He wants it to be higher. He wants more people to visit The Atlantic and maybe click on an advertisement.

Thompson finishes his piece by saying:
...it is quantitatively not a good deal for The Atlantic. Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.
As a libertarian, who tries to get the ideas of liberty in front of as many people as possible, my motivation is the polar opposite of Thompson's.

While Thompson seeks to lure people to look at ads at The Atlantic, my motivation is for people to simply read the ideas that I'm expressing.

Americans, from a very young age, live in a statist bubble. Day-in and day-out its: "The Emperor is great....The Emperor is magnificent...The Emperor is magical."

My motivation is that (for once) they read: "The Emperor has no clothes!"

That's the reward!

Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I put out the following tweet. It's been viewed almost 1,000 times:


For me, the reward for 5 seconds of typing that tweet is that 1,000 people were exposed to the idea!

That tweet garnered 15% interaction. Why do you think the percentage is so much higher than Thompson's? I think it's because my idea pops out! In a sea of military worship, those 2 sentences stick out like a sore thumb. It's as if someone puts a pin in the statist bubble.

Out of those 1,000 people, I'm sure a good chunk never thought of the U.S. military as trying to run the world. All they know is that when you see a member of the military, you should start clapping your hands, or throw confetti into the air.

Am I complaining that I didn't receive any ad revenue for my 5 seconds of typing? Of course not!

When The State goes into war escalation mode, there are now 1,000 more people out there that have an anti-war idea lodged in their brain.

You can't put a price on that.



1 comment:

  1. Chris - You and Thompson have a lot in common. You both use Twitter and you both ignore what the market is telling you.

    ReplyDelete