The last days of the Twitterati?
Raymond Snoddy wants to know if Twitter has had its day, despite its effectiveness as a communications tool.
Are the best days of Twitter over before they have scarcely begun? Four years to the month since founder Jack Dorsey sent his first Twitter – or twttr – as it was referred to in the original posting, the phenomena is showing signs of advanced middle age.
After all, four years is something of an eternity in social cyberspace.
Just when you think the world is at your feet, and often before any significant money has been made, you imperceptibly turn into a Friends Reunited or a My Space before your very eyes. No longer cool.
In retrospect the high water mark for Twitter came last July. Numbers have been down ever since and this cannot be wholly attributed to the disillusion of Stephen Fry, whose Twitter career apparently came to a temporary end when someone made the unfortunate mistake of saying his tweets were boring.
Although 2009 ended with just over 75 million active users, new Twitter registrations have been in decline for the past six months, and the average Twitter user now has 27 followers, down from 42 in August. An even more devastating statistic shows that only 20% of tweeters come back to tweet in their second month.
But they of course are the ones who get it and are hooked.
Isn’t this all alarming just when the marketing community were starting to get their minds around how best to use Twitter in their campaigns?
Relax. Twitter is not a Facebook or a Bebo. It is mainly used by an older demographic and is therefore not so subject to the vagaries of passing fashion. Twitter still has legs.
It is more of an information service than a social networking operator and above all else it has established itself as an important communications tool in everything from disasters to presidential elections. Commerce is already following.
The gradual transformation has been recognised by the change in the come on line. The initial: What Are You Doing was too obviously inflammatory to those who thought the world would be interested in what they were having for breakfast.
The What Is Happening question is more potentially powerful and clearly opens up more possibilities.
The obvious reality is that Twitter has been hijacked by some of its users and turned into something quite different from the dictionary definition which attracted its founders to the name “a short burst of inconsequential information”.
The inconsequential should remain and is part of its charm but will not be the main game in future.
Research by Pear Analytics in the US, on a typical sample of American tweets, showed that 41% were “pointless babble”, 38% “conversational” with what was described as “pass along value” accounting for 9%. Spam came in at 5%.
Then there was “self-promotion” with 6% and news making up only 4%.
The pleasure of pointless babble could easily fade and you will probably see three categories expand in future: pass along value as in celebrating what is good and useful, self-promotion to establish public presence for individuals, goods and services and self-evidently news.
Was there ever such a service for breaking news – the equivalent of the news flash from the Press Association or Reuters – but that went only to a few media professionals.
It is self-evident that Twitter is now firmly established as a serious communication tool that saved lives in Haiti and brought the first pictures of the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Twitter was used to rally the opposition in Iran and undercut the outrageous attempt by solicitors Carter-Ruck to misuse super-injunctions to protect corporate interests. Nothing inconsequential about that.
There is even the thought – expounded in a recent New York Times article that Twitter could provide an important under-pinning for traditional television.
James Poniewoziak argued that twitter and the likes of Facebook were a factor in recent record ratings for big TV events in the US such as the Super Bowl and Oscars.
The Oscar awards were watched by 41 million in the US this year – 5 million more than last – although movies like Avatar obviously helped.
Poniewoziak calls it Twittercooler , the recreation of the watercooler moment in electronic form, generating interest in real time with thousands of your fellow couch potatoes.
As a result new media such as Twitter are not replacing TV but providing a more satisfying way to watch it. It is a double-edged sword.
Really bad shows can be put out of their misery in seconds. You don’t have to wait for the over-nights any more.
There is one final – accidental – reason why Twitter will endure: the happy fact that the communication is limited to 140 characters.
The limit, which grew out of Twitter’s origins in SMS messages, makes even the most inconsequential just about palatable. The limit must always be defended.
It sets up a challenge every time – how to say something that has meaning and do it in the English language with punctuation and without lapsing into careless mobile phone patois in only 140 characters – 94 shorter than this sentence.