Trouble in Twitterland
It almost seems like the world of social networks exploded into full maturity in the last few years. In fact, social networks have been around for some time. Probably the one that began to really get a lot of media attention was MySpace.
One reason for the tremendous popularity of MySpace was the feature that allowed you to build a large network of contacts. Not only was this fun for individuals, it became tremendously useful to businesses and entrepreneurs to use for marketing purposes. It was the world of MySpace that saw the music industry really begin to tap the power of social networks when new musical "stars" gained their early fame entirely through their MySpace networks.
But it was when Facebook burst on the scene that social networking really began to dominate a lot of discussions that had anything to do with the internet. Today it almost seems inconceivable for anyone who is the least bit "plugged in" to not have their own Facebook account that they keep up with pretty much every day. So when Twitter arrived with much fanfare and excitement, it seemed that we were watching the rapid evolution of social networking and that Twitter would steal the thunder from Facebook the way Facebook did to MySpace.
But the social networking world seems to have said, "Not so fast." There is no question that Twitter has had some significant success. It was only a few months ago when Iran was going through what seemed to be the beginnings of a revolution that Twitter became an important tool for those who were seeking freedom in that country to communicate with supporters around the world. In fact, Iran finally had to shut down Twitter in the country because it was doing so much to further the unrest.
While that moment in history will always be associated with Twitter, it appears that in terms of long term success and growth, there may be trouble in Twitterland. The Twitter social network has not toppled Facebook as the premier network out there by any stretch of the imagination. While it is true that the Twitter network grew by leaps and bounds and it has gotten plenty of notoriety, the level of actual participation of Twitter members has been sluggish at best.
A recent study conducted by an e-mail and Web security company called Barracuda Networks Inc. has come up with some pretty striking findings. One statistic that jumps out is that only about 21% of the people who have Twitter accounts use them on a regular basis. That means that there are a lot of inactive accounts out there. It also creates a false impression of success for Twitter. The odds are the actual membership of Twitter may be almost as large as Facebook's. But with such low participation, the traffic they can document is far lower than they would like.
Other statistics from the study are just as revealing including these numbers…
- Over a third of the users of Twitter have not sent out a "tweet" since they set up the account.
- 17% of Twitter citizens have no followers. This is quite an accomplishment considering it is hard not to pick up at least automated marketing followers.
- Even more shocking is that 61% of Twitter citizens have less than five followers.
- 74% of people who have Twitter accounts have less than 10 followers.
- 51% of Twitter users follow less than 5 people
These are telling statistics and even more so because they have not changed or become more extreme over the last couple of studies. It also runs against the image that Twitter is such a dominant internet presence and that it is taking up a lot of time for a lot of internet users. Perhaps one reason that perception is so strong is because the media and Hollywood has embraced Twitter in a big way.
There are a number of big Hollywood celebrities who collect thousands and thousands of followers on Twitter. So one of the most well known uses of Twitter is for fans to follow every action and movement of their favourite stars. This is even more of a trend in young people as they seek to follow their favourite movie or musical celebrities. In that way, Twitter is more of a marketing device than a social network. When Miley Cyrus or one of the cast of Twilight Tweets a message every hour to hundreds of thousands of fans, that is the equivalent of a very active fan publication more so than a social network where there is interaction between the parties and interaction between members of a network.
If these statistics are not distressing enough to the Lords and Ladies of Twitterland, there are signs that even the young people are turning away from Twitter. Some young celebrates have deleted their accounts and have made statements encouraging youth to abandon Twitter and even to get out of the social networking world entirely. The influence of these celebrities will make a difference in that it is clear that many young people use Twitter almost exclusively to follow their favourite celebrities.
At this time, the decline in usage and interest by members of Twitterland do not seem to be having the same effect on Facebook. While Facebook has its own problems, the way people can connect to each other seems to be stronger and able to keep people connected to the network and interacting with each other. Twitter has worked hard to try to keep up by adding ways to display photos and to make their service resemble some of the post popular aspects of Facebook.
Of course, to users, they have no reason to switch to Twitter when Facebook is satisfactory to them. So, for the time being, Facebook continues to dominate the market with no signs of losing that hold on their vast population.
This doesn’t mean the Twitter experiment will be a failure. Twitter has made a splash in the social networking world and one can easily foresee Twitter becoming absorbed into Facebook, into the new effort by Google to compete in the social networking world, Google Buzz or by some other upstart effort. The people who have invested in Twitter will be rewarded. And while Twitter may not survive for a long, long time in its current form, some of the catch words that we have come to associate it like "tweeting" will probably continue to be popular in internet culture for a long time to come.
Filed Under: The Internetz
