Is Twitter going to make it?
One quick look at Twitter’s growth over the past year will tell you that something is up.
About nine months ago Twitter was seeing massive growth, but over the past 10 months the site has actually seen a drop in traffic. Perhaps some of this could be attributed to compete.com not picking up mobile traffic? Not sure how the compete.com algorithm works (anyone reading this know?), but you can see that Facebook had a similar growth explosion a year ago but is still steadily growing according to compete.com, and the number of people connecting with Facebook on mobile devices is growing in leaps and bounds.
Some interesting Twitter facts, compliments of Social Media Today:
* 87% of Americans 12-and-over are aware of Twitter
* Of that same group, only 7% are using it, which is roughly 17 million people
* Twitter is huge in the African American community, making up 25% of the users
* 53% of Twitter users never post anything. Ever.
It’s that last stat that makes me worried for Twitter’s long-term health. If over half the Twitterverse is using the medium only to listen and probably barely doing that, what does that mean for a service that is built on the idea of quick, engaging communication?
Personally, I love Twitter. But then again, I’ve loved many services that over time weren’t able to hang in there. I’m hoping that Twitter finds a niche and is able to become something that can last the span of time. But at the moment, most of the signs I’m seeing point to that not being the case.
Interesting observation, I think it is very spot on to be aware of Twitter's reality. They could be a “MySpace” or “FriendFeed” if things don't change direction. It would suck if that were to happen as it is a great service, but they need to find a platform partner (facebook, yahoo or MSN). Twitter probably needs to look at a PR story as well and talk about API calls and how amny folks access them via 3rd party platforms.
I'm wondering if it's because Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio continues to get further out of whack. Seems it's getting more and more choked with marketing and spam. I have 382 followers right now, but I can guarantee probably half (or more) of them are empty marketing shills that don't give two craps what I have to say.
They follow me because at some point I mentioned some keyword they're tracking, in the desperate hope that I'll follow them back. I don't.
Then of course you've got guys like Guy Kawasaki and Scoble that just won't shut the hell up. I think the dust is starting to settle and people are starting to see the highs and lows more clearly.
when building my company, i specifically wanted to avoid the pitfalls of a social network for a lot of the reasons mentioned above.
in my case, we set out to build a resource that can still be valuable when all of us involved are long gone.
i think the major difference between facebook and twitter is the ability to grasp the purpose. you know what you're getting with facebook, but with twitter, i truly believe there is a learning curve involved. i originally signed up in jan. 08, but it wasn't until august 08 that i actually started tweeting.
i don't think too many people are following john mayer's lead and moving towards tumblr (maybe the songwriter demographic…),
jeff-another thing not mentioned is the API forms such as tweetdeck & hootsuite. look at their increased awareness & usage over the last couple months: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/hootsuite.com+… stark contrast from the twitter numbers
Adam, both you and @michaelkogon make great points, essentially Twitter does an amazing job of getting press, but a very poor job of using that press to actually grow their user base.
Now I get that most of the press we see is not Twitter's doing, but they must know they have a misperception problem when it comes to getting people to understand its value, and they know that the media is dying to write about them, so you'd think they'd have done or could do a better job utilizing that to drive new users who actually “get it” quickly.
yeah, i think it's an interesting dynamic. IMO, thousands of new jobs have been opened because of twitter (and the learning curve), and more specifically, those who self-proclaim themselves as “social media experts.”
quick note on my initial point: i fully believe twitter's core value lies in real-time search…so it's definitely more than just a social network.
Last night after #Lost I wanted to know what people thought about the episode (because I was scratching my head) and the only real way to do that in mass was to search Twitter for the hashtag. So today its the only real-time search game in town.
But if it doesn't get massive numbers of users, is it still really a viable method of real-time search? 10MM active users (people actually tweeting) was the pool of people that I was searching from for Lost information, and while that's a decent chunk, its also a niche group and not necessarily indicative of the entire population.