By Stewart Baines, 22 March 2010 17:31
COMMENT
Once a poster child for social media success, Twitter is now showing signs of diminished popularity. Stewart Baines explains what this means for your business.
Reports are emerging that Twitter is on the wane - apparently user growth is slowing to a halt.
So does this mean that marketers, customer services and product developers should stop listening to Twitter and move on to the next big thing?
Not so fast... let's look at the back story first.
While activity on Twitter continues to increase - the number of tweets per day is now approaching 50 million - this is largely due to an active core of one-in-five registered users who are becoming more and more engaged. According to marketing software company Hubspot, the average Twitter user in January 2010 had 300 followers compared to around 60 last July.
Twitter's problem is adding to its 75 million users. Yes, it's a considerable number, but in social media, scale is everything.
A report from research firm Barracuda Labs found that the number of new Twitter users grew just 0.34 per cent in December 2009, down from a peak of 20 per cent new users joining in April 2009. Hubspot's figures show that the peak of new users was in March 2009 (13 per cent) and fell to four per cent in October 2009.
And these are not the first reports to identify the problem. A report in September last year from research firm Hitwise found that in 2008, Twitter accounted for 0.01 per cent of visits to all websites. By June 2009, this had climbed to 0.20 per cent before falling to 0.17 per cent in September.
I realise it's pretty hard to get accurate stats on Twitter use because so many access the service via desktop software, but there is enough evidence to suggest that the number of people who want to use this social networking tool based solely on status updates which are broadcasted (i.e. you don't really have control who follows you), has reached its limit.
Can you hear me?
Twitter users may have already noticed that it's getting harder to be heard. Some highly engaged social media practitioners I know, tweeting many times per day, are reporting that it's getting more and more difficult to grow their followers organically, especially with people who are genuinely interested in what they have to say. Instead, they are being followed indiscriminately by people who want to gain social capital, with a trigger-happy 'retweet' finger.
The problem may be that the noise has reached a threshold. The cacophony created by status updates from hundreds or thousands of people, proffering links to interesting articles, dipping into conversations half-way through and dull missives about lunchtime sandwiches, is obviously getting too much for some folk.
To filter out the noise, Twitter users tend to engage or converse with a smaller number of people than their following count would imply. There's some science behind this - it's called Dunbar's Number, a concept coined by cognitive anthropologist Adrian Dunbar who posits that the average person cannot sustain more than 150 friendships. His work correlates with animal studies showing that this magic number crops up all over the animal world too.
Twitter: Not just for status updates anymore
So what should we read in to this? Is Twitter really on the wane?...
