WILL TWITTER ENDURE?

Introduction
This isn’t just meant to be a general question of interest about the internet, social media and companies such as Twitter. It’s, also, the sort of question that individuals are asking for marketing/business reasons. In particular, managers, for example, who want to know why employees should use Twitter. I have listed some articles – in purple, see below – by leading people in social media who provide arguments and examples / case studies why Twitter is so effective as a marketing tool. 

We’ve seen some popular platforms come and go in the recent past – GeoCities, being a good example. It was bought by Yahoo for $3.57 billion. It’s now gone (except for GeoCities – Japan). Staggering really. Is Twitter, too, just a fad? Is it really worth spending time (and perhaps money) on?

Mashable recently wrote a piece on whether Twitter’s growth had stopped. Nothing concrete was being suggested. Nevertheless, GeoCities did flit through my mind for a split moment. However, a few days later, the following headline appeared: “Bill Gates Surpasses 100,000 Twitter Followers in 8 Hours”. The aura of the Twitter phenomenon was back.

I don’t think a stall in Twitter growth or a hike in interest in the social media platform, thanks to the Chairman of Microsoft, signifies anything dramatic. Anyway, has there really been a stall in Twitter growth (how many Twitter users go untraced?). And even if there has been a stall, let’s put it into context. Twitter has been a business and cultural phenomenon. It’s growth in 2009 was extraordinary (for example: Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February 2009 source). Such stalls are inevitable, surely?

On the other hand, yes, it’s great PR to get Bill Gates on board. But how much does that really tell us about where Twitter really stands now and where it is heading?

The New York Times wrote an interesting piece on why Twitter will endure. I agree with them completely on why Twitter is so great. But it doesn’t follow that because something is great, it will endure (GeoCities ..). Someone could come up with a social media platform (or a combination of two platforms or more, for example) that is greater than Twitter. I don’t think it’s a good idea to make firm predictions about Twitter’s staying power like this.

Can we glean anything important about Twitter’s staying power by understanding its users?

Twitter is used for both commercial (marketing / branding / social media marketing / business networking and so on) and for non-commercial reasons (friends chatting etc ..), of course. Many commercial users have already invested a lot of time in building up Twitter followers. Do they really want to leave Twitter and spend lots of time, again, on another social platform building up followers, again, there? And let’s not forget how effective Twitter has proved as a marketing/business tool in general (I think so from my experience. And so do these – links to articles: i.e. Blogging, launching sites, Branding, Publicity, Customer Service, Networking, Sales, Broadcasting, and there are many other good examples). It would be much easier to lose non-commercial users than commercial users of Twitter.

How would losing non-commercial Twitter users affect commercial Twitter users?

At one level, it would really only affect consumer brands (branding to consumers via Twitter, for example). But a rush to another site could, perhaps, create some sort of business/cultural phenomenon such as Twitter, with the wave of non-commercial users taking the commercial users with them. On the other hand it would have to be something spectacular to create this wave.

Twitter could, also, potentially, lose commercial users if:

- non-real-time social-media platforms arrived on the scene that proved to be more effective as marketing/business tools than Twitter

-Facebook, from a non-real-time perspective becomes more of a threat (as a marketing/business tool)

- a real-time social media platform arrived on the scene that proved to be more effective as a marketing/business tools than Twitter.

-Facebook, from a real-time perspective becomes more of a threat (as a marketing/business tool).

I don’t see how any social platform, at the moment, that could compete with Twitter in terms of its overall attractiveness as a marketing/business tool and for appealing to non-commercial users as well. Twitter has the advantage of:

- its status as a cultural/business phenomenon

- people who have spent much time on the platform gathering followers

- its search results now appear in Google

- the sheer quantity of Twitter apps (50,000 source), and more.

It has a head-start is too big, I think.

“I don’t see how any social platform, at the moment, could compete with Twitter in terms of its overall attractiveness as a marketing/business tool and for appealing to non-commercial users as well” – that is, except Facebook! Facebook, as a threat from a real-time perspective, perhaps (?) But, also, Facebook as an even bigger competitor to Twitter in general, perhaps (?)

So my advice to marketing/business people concerned about the staying power of Twitter is that Twitter is in a very strong position right now. That Twitter is an excellent marketing/business platform with the possibility for a variety of uses. That time spent on strategic-thinking and building up followers, and so on, is time (and perhaps money) well spent. Who knows – Twitter might even become much bigger than it already is: becoming a real rival to Google in search (human search versus algorithmic search), perhaps. And Facebook could (or might not at all) become more of a rival to Twitter in general. If so, it would be a while before that happens, I think. A year or so at least (and a lot can be achieved within a year). Maybe longer (maybe not all ..).

What do you think?

Also, which do you think is better as a marketing tool – Facebook or Twitter? –> here

@Pharmacy Technician – Thanks ..