Big Platforms are Dying. That’s a Good Thing. Here’s Why:

There will never be another Twitter. And that’s a good thing. A lot of platforms have been trying to replace it, a lot of users have been looking for a substitute. It’s time to stop, and to think about what we really want—and why.

I’ll start with a case study. I am an author; I write #books for a living and have published with the second largest press in the industry. Because Twitter became the primary egg basket, an assumed direct link to readers, publishers demanded that authors have high follow numbers. It could even make or break a deal; it certainly affected side of advance. Why? Because publishers had put the onus on writers to do a lion’s share of marketing. But Twitter was more like a highway with fast cars and billboards than a community as such. Have 10k followers? Great. That does not mean 10k will even see your posts much less respond (or buy books).

In the before-times, a book might be advertised as a poster in a book shop, or even in a subway terminal (this still happens, but publishers now only do this for top % sellers).  Not everyone will see that ad either, but bookstores and train stations, along with newspapers and magazines, operate in slow time. A tweet whizzes by in nanoseconds, but you wait ten minutes for the train.

I remember seeing Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane in a London tube station. I saw Sarah Perry’s Essex Serpent too—both of these as books (subsequently they have had other iterations in TV/theater). I remember thinking how smart and stylish those posters were, mentally tracing the serpent on Sarah’s cover as I went down an escalator. Now, both of these authors also have big social media presence, but the point remains: slow time favors a relationship with content. Twitter does not do that.

The trouble, for publishing but also many other forms of content creation, is that a false equivalence has been made. Posters/ads=Twitter. But here is the math on that. If you have a total social platform follows around 500k and hit social media hard before a book launch, posting many times a day, you expect uptake. Let’s say you are really successful and reached enough people for 5000 pre-orders. That is awesome! But that’s only 1% of total followers (and that’s not including all the re-shares).

‘Okay,’ you say. ‘Now what?’ Here is a different case study. In the lead up to the 4th season of Peculiar Book Club (a YouTube show and podcast featuring nonfiction authors), I also did a big campaign. I never had many followers; just shy of 10k. But I have a newsletter for the PBC with 780 people on it. As far as I can tell, all of my subscribers to S4 came from those emails. That’s about 50 people. Nothing like 3000! But the math is better: for one newsletter a week, the uptake was 6%. That’s 6% rather than 0.6%. Newsletters operate in slow time. It’s a community and not a freeway.

Where am I going with all of this? In the waning of Twitter, I think it’s time we go back to slow-time community driven interactions. (Even FB is figuring this out, it seems, changing the way interaction happens to avoid the Twitter death spiral). As authors, but also as consumers, as small businesses, as news sources, we need to rethink how we interact and what it means to do so. Because we do not need another Twitter. We should endeavor to find something more—and better.