When typing out my thoughts and going well past a short tweet, I thought for longer than I should have about the title of this post. I like to give them a snappy title that sums everything up. The most logical word to use for this would be engagement, but like productivity, that word is ruined now.

It shouldn’t be. It is the reason I use social media and the driving motivation to stick around on Twitter when logically I should leave it behind. Talking to people and engaging with others is the point, after all, social media without the social part is pretty pointless. Yet, we all base its importance on numbers and stats that mean nothing.

I must admit that I still don’t really ‘get’ social media. I’ve never been able to crack that part of my marketing brain and really push on to succeed in that world. Mainly because all the ‘engagement’ stats that people measure against mean nothing to me. Likes, hearts, clicks, all that kind of stuff just don’t matter to me. The people behind them do, and it’s so sad that all the importance of social media seems to be dying apart from these things.

My followers have fluctuated between 1,900 and 2,500 for years. Loads of bots pump it up for a bit, and then Twitter sorts it out and deletes loads of them. I’m not a popular figure in the slightest, but the replies that I get are from a cross-section of roughly 30 people. A small sliver of the people who are supposedly following me and interested in what I have to say. Again, at risk of sounding ungrateful, this number means nothing to me, but the people do, so where are they?

Why has Twitter died so much, to a point that interactions are few and far between? Since the whole Elon thing, it seems as if once great Twitter users can’t be bothered any more. Myself included. Much like the job market struggles, perhaps the pandemic has made people realise that all this superficial stuff doesn’t matter any more and their time is worth more. I can only speculate, but many of the real people seem to have gone.

The enjoyment I take from tweeting seems to becoming less and less. I thought for a long time this was me, I wasn’t engaging enough and no one was interested in this old dude any more. As time has gone on, I realised the reason I tweeted less and less was because others were tweeting less and finding similar struggles.

At least that what I am telling myself, or maybe I am just old and don’t get it any more.