#writerslift and Twitter Beggars
We originally wrote about this a few months after we joined Twitter. Thankfully, the Writers Lift (Writer's Lift?) subsequently lost popularity, though we're sure that muting #writerslift helped, too.
After we started promoting our work on Twitter, we noticed a couple of things. One of them was a phenomenon called 'Writers Lift', which occurs among Twitter's Writing Community. There's no consensus about the Lift in the community. There are those who support it, and those who complain about and sometimes mock it. For those not in the know, the #writerslift is a ritual in which someone asks writers to reply to a tweet with descriptions of their books and/or links to where they're available, promising to RT them all. This means that the person doing the Lift will be dumping a bunch of tweets about books of every genre on their followers' timelines. It also means that when you visit the profiles of several writers to see if maybe they'd be interesting to follow, all you'll see are a bunch of RTs of tweets about other people's books. Doesn't the continuous dumping of random book recommendations limit the types of followers those accounts can get? Exactly how many people outside the Writing Community want to have their already messy timelines (thanks, Twitter) cluttered with stuff they may not be interested in? Does anyone even read those RTs, or do they just scroll past them? And considering how many writers follow each other, isn't someone engaging in a Writers Lift basically retweeting these book descriptions and links to the same people over and over again in an endless cycle of Sisyphean madness? How does that help promote anything?
Another thing we noticed at the time were the tweets asking for more followers. 'I'm new here. Please help me reach 1000 followers.'. WTF?! First, many of these 'newbies' had already been around for a couple of years. Second, the ones who hadn't were just greedy. One thousand followers? Seriously? You've been here for less than a month! Oh, and there was also the 'I only need 400 followers to reach 3000, so please follow' tweets. Really? To make things worse, many of these 'writer' accounts didn't have much writing-related content apart from RTs of other people's work. You got a very short Bio that didn't tell you anything about this person's WIP or favourite genres. There was also no Pinned Tweet. And yet, every single one of them had (and probably still has) more followers than us despite in most cases having joined Twitter after we did. So, begging for followers apparently works, though much like with Writers Lift, we've stopped seeing these kinds of tweets.
But what do all of these people get from each other? Are they really interacting or is it just a numbers game? And if it's just numbers, what's the point? Congratulations, you have 1000 followers who don't give a shit about your tweets, but then again, it's not as if you're actually tweeting anything else other than follower requests, so maybe it all evens out in the end.
