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SUNDAY, June 14, 2009
User Tips and Tricks for Intermediate and Advanced Twitter Users—
A very insightful article
:
Twitter is easily one of the most hyped platforms on the Web over the past year. And
rightly so; it's astronomical growth rate is a rarity. But according to new data from
Compete.com, Twitter's growth has hit a major wall. From April to May, Twitter's
unique visitors grew just 1.4 percent - a far cry from when traffic more than doubled
from February to April. Does this mean that Twitter mania is over?
There is little doubt that Twitter has gained some form of acceptance with the public.
But major doubt exists over who that public is, exactly. A recent study by Harvest
Business Review revealed that just 10 percent of Twitter users account for a whopping
90 percent of messages sent, or tweets. According to the study, "This implies that
Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a
two-way, peer-to-peer communication network." On a typical social network, the
top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of production.
In addition, the study shows that half of Twitter users tweet less than once every
74 days, and the median number of lifetime tweets is exactly ... one. That paints a
picture of a handful of rabid users, and a gross majority of users who signed up out
of curiosity, then abandoned the idea. Or, these hyper-active Twitter users have
several, even dozens of different accounts - a very likely scenario. Similar to domain
squatting, some Twitter users have snapped up usernames in the hopes of earning
some kind of return down the line. That's evidenced by Twitter's announcement of
Verified Account, coming soon.
When you put it all together, it appears Twitter is being used by a few very heavily,
and mostly to broadcast information in the hopes of generating attention and traffic.
And, based on Twitter's current iteration and news about Twitter search to include
content included in all those tiny links, that's exactly what Twitter is - an information
portal and distribution service.
So does this decrease Twitter's value?
Not necessarily. While the sudden traffic stall is slightly alarming, it was bound to
happen at some point. And even if Twitter users are not tweeting themselves, they
are listening in. Just like Wikipedia is edited by a very small percentage of Wikipedia
users, the site is visited by millions of people to gather information. While you may
not be communicating with as many people as initially thought, this is no reason to
abandon your Twiitter marketing efforts. Just understand that the numbers are highly
inflated. That said, any time major media sources, pro sports teams, celebrities and
professional organizations are promoting their Twitter feeds to the public, so should you.
The real threat to Twitter are forged followers and relationships. Twitter users look
to an account's followers as an indication of their value. And followers can be easily
inflated. Just like link farms of the past, there are "follower farms." Pay a few bucks,
get thousands of followers. It's also thought that retweets will indicate authority on
a given topic or Twitter account. Again, easily forged by using multiple accounts.
As Twitter evolves into an information portal, there's a rush to index all of that
content (and there is tons of it). Where Google has PageRank and link authority,
Twitter has followers and retweets.
If they're not careful, Twitter runs the risk of incurring the same problems as every
other search engine. It is of critical importance that Twitter find a way to quantify
followers and relationships. From a user perspective, the value of Twitter is in the
connections - we follow those with whom we share interests so that we receive
relevant information and cut down on all the noise. If this system is too easily
manipulated, it's a huge step backwards in semantic search, an area where Twitter
has massive potential.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Good Twitter Article in the Newspaper
Twitter? It’s What You Make It
By DAVID POGUE (New York Times)
Writing can be solitary work, but not when you write a tech column. Feedback pours in so quickly — by e-mail, on blogs, in online comments — that it’s almost real-time performance art.
For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?
True, there’s nothing quite like Twitter. It’s a Web site where you can broadcast very short messages — 140 characters, max — to anyone who’s signed up to receive them. It’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room. Your “followers” might include six friends from high school, or, if you’re Barack Obama, 254,484 of your most tech-savvy fans. (Incidentally, he hasn’t sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)
Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff.
Even so, I was turned off by the whole ego thing. Your profile displays how many followers you have, as if it’s some kind of worthiness tally. (See also: Facebook friend counter.)
Then one day, I saw Twitter in action.
Read the rest of the article here
