It may be simply my “over 30s” grumpiness starting to show, but I’m starting to find “brands'” use of social media to be immensely irritating. And even more irritating is the fact that their techniques seem to work — which, of course, perpetuates the whole hideous cycle until someone snaps and goes on a mad katana rampage.

I’m talking primarily about that faux cheerfulness that pretty much every brand page out there shows when addressing its audience. “Hey [insert collective noun here that is tangentially related to being a fan of the product in question]! [exclamation mark is important to show enthusiasm] We thought it’d be a great idea to [adopt some out of date Internet meme/take goofy photos of our office/make a cringeworthy video] so we did! And here’s the proof! [insert link to photo/video/blog post]”.

Getting your audience to engage with you is one thing. Getting them to engage with you on a meaningful level is an altogether different thing. I genuinely once saw the The Sims 3 Facebook page ask the community what their favourite colour was. Nearly a thousand people replied. I “Unliked” them shortly after that.

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to pin down exactly what it is that riles me so about this sort of thing. After all, the very fact that nearly a thousand people wanted to tell the faceless Sims 3 page that their favourite colour was, in fact, blue shows that it’s a system that seems to work. But does it have any value whatsoever? Does feeling like a brand is someone you can “talk to” help you feel any more fondness towards the product in question, or is it simply a novelty and a means of building community?

It depends on how you handle it, of course. If a question posed by a brand page is the start of a larger discussion which representatives of the brand then participate in, then it’s a good thing, in my opinion. However, for the most part in my experience, these sort of posts tend to just be “post something that lots of people won’t be able to resist replying to or Liking, light the blue touch paper and stand back”. After the initial question is posted, the brand steps back and doesn’t participate in the discussion any further, leaving the community to fight each other over whether or not the man who said pink was his favourite colour is gay or not.

The side-effect of all this relentless posturing by brands is that it leads to a feeling of saturation. By way of example, I’ve been so bombarded with teaser videos, images, exhortations to “celebrate FemShep Friday” and numerous other pieces of detritus that I’ve, ironically, lost any enthusiasm I may have had for Mass Effect 3 and probably won’t be buying it.

“Ignore it,” you may say. “Unlike it. Unfollow it.”

Believe me, I have. But sometimes you need to venture on to those pages to find out useful pieces of information — like, say, release dates — and end up having to mine your way through pages and pages of completely, utterly worthless nonsense in order to find anything relevant. That, surely, isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Or perhaps it is, and that’s why I don’t work as a “social media guru” or whatever.

On the flipside to all this, companies seem to be a lot better at using Twitter in a manner which doesn’t infuriate me. The very way in which Twitter works — you don’t see replies from people/brands you are following that are directed to people you aren’t following yourself — means that a lot of this unnecessary noise is filtered out. And the fact that tweets are, by their very nature, somewhat transient means that there’s no means for a 1,000-post comment thread discussion on favourite colours to take place. This is a Good Thing.

The best brands on Twitter do one of two things: post relevant information at a steady pace for you to check out at your leisure (see: feeds from websites or companies that have regularly-updating news) or use Twitter for one of its primary functions — as a means of communication.

In the former case, what you essentially get is a bit like an RSS feed relating to the product or company you’re interested in. In the latter case, you get some of the most helpful customer support I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience.

Take the poor souls over on the XboxSupport Twitter account, for example. These absolute saints have to deal with bombardments of questions every day, and somehow they still manage to remain polite, professional and — most importantly — get straight to the point. Ask them a question and they’ll do their best to answer you in a single tweet, and often very quickly, too. What you don’t get from them is vapid crowd-baiting questions or upselling suggestions to check out/buy additional products.

A lot of other companies have cottoned on to this in the last couple of years. I was particularly impressed with Orange’s support Twitter account, which helpfully resolved an issue I had tried (and failed) on several occasions to sort out over the phone. Xbox Support, too, have been great, and I’m sure there’s plenty of other examples out there.

I suppose there’s a lesson in all this somewhere. I should probably resist that inviting-looking Like button at the top of Facebook pages I can see are filled with vapid nonsense, and stick to only following things that actually provide useful information. Otherwise all that ends up happening is you feel completely burned out by the multisensory marketing bombardment you experience on a daily basis — and you end up hating things that you formerly liked. (Sorry, Mass Effect. It’s not you, it’s me.)