Luke Brown Marketing Blog

Archive for December, 2009

The Global Language Monitor recently announced that ‘Twitter’ was the top word of 2009. Stories about Twitter are on news sources of all kinds. Twitter has been called everything from the 8th wonder of the world to something that will profoundly change humanity.

Come on, people. Take off the blinders, disregard the lemmings, and grab a cold shower of reality. Twitter is hype, a fad, an in-your-face has-been. In a year of overkill – Michael Jackson’s death, Balloon Boy and his idiot parents, and Tiger Woods’ appetite for off-menu entrees – Twitter takes the Overkill Prize of 2009.

That’s not to say Twitter doesn’t have value, because it does. That Google now includes tweets in real time searches shows the power of Twitter. But recent numbers point to a decline in Twitter’s actual website visitors and, more importantly, a decline in new users.

Matthew Daines, the lead developer of Twellow (Twitter Yellow Pages), shared a couple new graphs for November. The number of new users declined for the fourth consecutive month and is now down 24.4% from the July, 2009 high.

While the number of new users continued to decline, the number of tweets per user continued to rise. This could indicate several aspects:

• those who have found success on Twitter are devoting more time to it
• spammers are having a field day
• those who found Twitter useless for their business were not tweeting often

It’s still too early to determine which is a cause and which is an effect. Twitter saw many changes in November and change makes people uncomfortable, so it’s very possible the numbers just reflect a temporary disconnect. Here are just some of the November changes:

• The new retweet feature was introduced
• The “What are you doing?” question was changed to “What’s Happening?” for updates
• It implemented a partnership with LinkedIn so tweets show up on LinkedIn

Twitter has a paid service planned for the near future though that is no guarantee that it can make money or that its business model is profitable or sustainable. Business people should be familiar with Twitter in case it does turn into a valuable tool. At this time, however, it doesn’t seem prudent to invest too much time, money or effort into something which is profitable for so few people.