Twitter Links Are Conversations? Give Me Break!



2009 April, 29th
Mihaela Lica
Mihaela Lica

Today I dared to complain that 90% of the tweets I read on my profile home were links.

Mig complaining about too many links.

Immediately Nicole Simon, who is a German social media strategist, responded:

@miguelstil links are conversation too. they are the twitter way of saying “I think you might enjoy this – tell me what you think of it”

Nicole Simon's reply on Twitter links.

Not long after, another social media enthusiast came to support Nicole’s response:

@miguelstil @NicoleSimon agree 100% w/ Nicole for more background, see http://sn.im/wisdom-link see also Vannevar Bush’s article about MEMEX

NMW supports the idea of conversation with Twitter links.

Doesn’t it strike you funny that the two people who support the idea of links as conversations are social media strategists? Not to mention that @nmw sent a link to his own article about links which says actually nothing about a conversational value, but about how these are the WWW relatives of the “footnotes”. A very interesting read, indeed, but it failed to prove the point that Twitter links have conversational value. Because they don’t and no matter how hard a social media guru tries to convince me that they do, I will stick to my belief.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a PR and an SEO and my experience with social media is not trivial. I should be the first to say: oh, yeah, Twitter links are great, because they are. But the conversational value of a link without hypertext is close to nothing in my book. Twitter links are tools: yes, they can be used to say “I think you might enjoy this – tell me what you think of it” but in most cases, they just say “hey, look at me, click on this link, I need the traffic” or “come to my site, buy my stuff” and I could go on forever.

I find Michael Martinez’s theory on links very frank (no relation with Twitter, but a good example of SEO value), and I do think of links as information points sometimes, but the too often misuse of links in various social networks, Twitter inclusive, made these tools subservient to other things like spam, sales, shameless self promotion, aggressive marketing.

Based on the statement above, categorizing all Twitter links as conversations is deceptive. Twitter links are meaningless if not preceded or followed by a short description of what they are. No hypertextual markup makes these links almost insignificant, questionable shortcuts to some web pages you probably don’t want to see.

On Twitter there is a way of making sense of a link if this is prefigured by certain conversations that have significance – like in the case of @nmw’s reply, where the link he sent was indeed adding to a conversation and acting like a “footnote”. But in most cases it is hard to guess why someone tweeted exactly this or that link. I will just go on assuming that the link expresses a clear intent of the author to draw the readers to a certain web page, and that this intent is not always altruistic. So much to the “conversational” value.

My view is that Twitter links are tools that enable access to information by allowing users to “travel” from Twitter to another site. They are channels, indeed, but by no means tools of rhetoric. Only hypertext links have that attribute, and till Twitter will allow the use of hypertext for links, let’s not fool ourselves saying that a display of tiny URL links is a conversation!

About the Author

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Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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