Some things we've discovered in the early stages of our Social Media Journey.
So we've started using Twitter.
Not really in expectation of anything coming from it - our social media nerd tells us that each tweet has a half-life of two seconds, so if you have fewer than like a million followers you're just yelling into the wilderness. And, as it stands, the conversion rate from even our wittiest tweets to actual sales of tea hovers around nil. Even now this is largely for our own amusement.
And we started it as a reasonably private archive of articles and pictures that felt relevant to our work here. At an early stage we found Twitter's search function. We thought this would be a good way of finding more stuff about tea, and of keeping up to date with developments in the industry.
Our journey began:
It rapidly became apparent that tea did not mean what we thought it meant. We thought it was a hot brown drink, tasty and refreshing, and about 30% of the time it does mean this on Twitter. You even get a few gems, one or two per day, that we add to our ever-growing Twitter archive. But over the last few weeks of keeping an eye on people talking about tea on Twitter we have been able to divide the bulk of the other 70% into seven main categories.
1. Ariana Grande
This is mostly the fault of one particular Twitter user, who follows the life of a singer called Ariana Grande with stalker-like intensity. Because the word 'tea' is in her Twitter handle, this comprises about 20% of all tweets about tea. I don't know why the word 'tea' is in her Twitter handle.
2. Very Thin Women
It turns out that tea, especially green tea, raises your metabolism or something and so is good if you want to lose weight. According to Twitter, this is, which is filled with a cacophony of competing brands trying to sell you detox tea or diet tea.
And what better way of doing this than with pictures of very thin women?
Look at how thin they are! Let us all drink skinny tea!
Two thoughts arise from this:
Thought 1. Very thin women used to be for selling things to men. Now they are for selling things to women.
Thought 2. On further investigation, many of the diet teas (legal note: probably not ASAP Skinny) are made by adding laxative to normal green tea. Doesn't this make the actual tea irrelevant?
3. Hot Celeb Goss
This one, again more common than references to tea (the drink), took me a bit longer to understand. The word tea seemed to be coming up in all sorts of random scenarios, often being 'spilled' and in relation to high profile performing artists from the world of American music.
In order to understand this, I went to Urban Dictionary, a site to which my old manager used to contribute under the name 'Wanksy'.
All is revealed! For the record, I shall also display the second most popular definition of tea in full because I found it funny.
Urban dictionary is great.
4. Bone Apple Tea
Also a mystery, but not a rare one.
Once more to Urban Dictionary:
Yup.
5. This Quote:
A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until you put it in hot water.
-Eleanor Roosevelt (or Nancy Reagan, depending on who posts it)
This is quoted several times per day, and to us it doesn't make sense as an analogy. Doesn't the tea get stronger the longer you leave the bag in it? I mean, you'd get some insight as to the flavour and quality of the tea/woman by putting it in hot water, but strengBut on the other hand, if it makes people feel better about themselves then it's fine with us.
6. Anti-Tea Party Activists
Some tea party supporters, too, but the movement seems to have withered of late to be replaced by Donald Trump and the alt-right. This withering has not stopped the anti-Tea Party brigade, who are extremely prolific and quite dull if, like us, you don't really follow or even understand US politics.
7: More about Ariana Grande
Isn't she great. Apparently she had a cold the other day. I hope she's better now.