Sunday, November 15, 2009

Twitter Stalling?

Interesting article on Twitter usage. The number of tweets is way up, but number of users is down.

All is not gloomy, however:

On an annual basis, Twitter is still going gangbusters with 1,271 percent growth from 1.4 million visitors in October, 2008. And on a global basis, it still seems to be chugging away with 58.4 million visitors in September. But a hypergrowth company like Twitter cannot afford to slow down in its home market.


Here's what I think this means: People sign up and then realize it's all a bit overwhelming. A smaller core actually use it actively. Plus, with Facebook and LinkedIn offering pretty much the same thing as Twitter...well, I think Twitter needs to evolve, a bit.

A while ago, I posted about a Harvard study on Twitter that showed most people on Twitter follow a pretty small number of posters. I recently waded back into Twitter on behalf of a client and found countless accounts with one or two tweets that were months old.

What does this have to do with communication? I think communicating in 140-character bursts isn't conducive to true conversation. It's more broadcasting thoughts that may, or may not, be interesting to others.

2 comments:

IsraLuv said...

i completely disagree with you. using 140 characters to engage in conversation is quite effective, but it takes time to understand how to be witty,charming, inquisitive and argumentative in 140 characters.

there are a lot of unused accounts but there are plenty of tweeters out there that use the platform to facilitate conversation.

Alan said...

Thanks for your comments!