LinkedIn has emailed me to say thanks. Aaah how touchingly American. And …I mean that most sincerely. Facebook for grownups is celebrating having 200 million users and apparently I have played my part as my profile was among the top 1% most hit upon in 2012. I am so touched. Grabs Onion. Weeps. I’d like to thank various of my stalkers, notably Mark & Sarah and those folks at legal firms Pinsent Masons and Kermans for crawling all over my activity log almost every day and making this possible. And so what does this all mean? Absolutely nothing.
While Facebook is inane, LinkedIn is just rather boring. Other than alerting me to the networking activities of Alecto Resources boss Damian Conboy ( liaising with the playboy PR bird Lucy HERE) I cannot say that it has really brought me much in the way of laughs over the past year. For what it is worth I am now on Facebook. I use it as I use LinkedIn to churn out links to my articles and so to attract readers to TomWinnifrith.com. And for what it is worth, over the past month LinkedIn has brought in about 3% of my traffic and Facebook 1.3%.
Natch I ‘d like to thank the two firms concerned but not by giving them any money. I am a customer in that I add to their metrics they boast about to hoodwink Wall Street. But the cash I generate for both firms is exactly £0.00. I have never clicked on an advert & will not do so. I use them for free marketing and that is it. I will link in or whatever the term is on Facebook with anyone (even one of those aforementioned stalkers) as it means they get alerted to my articles and might just be read them.
I am also sure that the 1% is misleading. In the same way that I think I am around the 2 millions most followed person ( of 500 million) on twitter ( @tomwinnifrith in case you want to push me over 3,000 today), the scales are logarithmic. So the top 2000 twitter people in terms of followers are followed by 1 million + or whatever and hen it tails off quite dramatically. And of course most of the twitter followers of those with a million + followers are paid for robots, exercises in vanity ( as I explained here) I am pretty sure LinkedIn traffic patterns are pretty similar. So being on the edge of the top 1% is a lot closer to being in the bottom 1% than it is to being in the top 0.1%. And on twitter I am closer in absolute terms to being the least followed person on this planet than I am to being the 1 millionth most followed.
Alerts on this article will naturally whizz off into the ether by twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – I still fail to grasp why I add anything at all to your bottom lines, but thanks for having me none the less.