The Death Of Twitter
Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by ciarandoyle in Twitter
The Death Of Twitter
Twitter Twitter everywhere, when I look I can see it, when I dont look someone is talking about it, but when I listen I hear that Twitter is falling out of grace in a fast way, is this The Death Of Twitter.
I have been thinking about alot about Twitter lately and all of the things taht one as an internet marketer can do with it, reason being I am speaking at an Internet Social Media Bootcamp in a few days and even though I'm not a huge fan of Twitter I felt that I must suggest some of the strategies that I am using to help people along. But, you know what, Twitter has not really been doing much for me of late, yep at the beginning I had a good group of followers who wanted to hear about what 'I' wanted to say, but now everything is 'if you follow me, i'll follow you back'.
Basically Twitter and it's use as a marketing 'Medium' seem to have had its day. I was listening to a Social Media call the other day with Michel & Sylvie Fortin and it kind of struck me how far people are actually taking Twitter. Here are some things you might not know about Twitter:
- Twitter has just made a profit for the first time.
- It has only made this profit because they have sold access to their search results for a one off fee to larger serach engines.
- Twitter as a company cannot guarantee that it will make profits in the future
- It's new idea of selling ad space like an ad network is being frowned upon by many as not a viable option
Basically, if Twitter cannot monetize what they are doing they will go under and do you know what, that means that anyone who are solely basing their business on Twitter might be in for a big surprise…. Your business going bust!
What people dont realise is that Twitter is a 'Medium' of communication, just like TV, Radio, Facebook, Adwords, its just a connector or a middle amn between YOU and your MARKETPLACE!
So you need to be moving away from the one type of marketing Medium onto different types, basically dont put all your eggs in one basket. Armand Morin has been talking about the Demise of Twitter for the last few months and I just got an email from Traffic Expert John Reese this moring saying:
"I just deleted my Twitter account. It had over 25,000 followers."
He goes on to say:
" But as Twitter has grown, it's become full of NOISE.
Even, though, my follower count has risen, the response to my tweets has been on a steady decline. The reason is simple…
There's just more and more noise on Twitter. People are following so many people that single tweets are easily missed in someone's timeline.
* I've confirmed this decline with many other Twitter users.
And it's only going to get worse."
So what to do?
I think the main thing to do is start looking at new avenues of communication with your audience, I'm not saying jump ship straight away, but i am definitley saying you need to start making plans.
I hope this helped you and if you have any queries let me know.
Talk soon
Ciaran
josephdshiller
02. Mar, 2010
I can't imagine someones business is solely dependent on Twitter. I just use it as an accessory to mine. If anyone is currently doing a lot of business because of Twitter, they will have already established a connection with their customers in other ways by now, like you have your customers addresses and phone numbers or they are on your list already. Lots are hooked up with you in other ways too (Linkedin, Facebook, etc), so the disappearance of Twitter is not such a big deal.
What do you mean “if Twitter cannot monetize what they are doing they will go under”? Last night,Craig Fergurson and Lauren Graham were going on and on about Twitter. I don't see how anything that popular can't be worth a lot. Somebody will offer a lot of money to buy Twitter, even if they don't monetize their self. Why not just keep it going for heck of it anyway? How much operating expense could they possibly have?
angelawills
02. Mar, 2010
Interesting post. I just cancelled my Facebook account for the same reason – too much noise. Plus all the games, and gifts and just sillyness was driving me crazy on Facebook, at least Twitter doesn't have that stuff.
I've recently found Twitter to be very useful for winning stuff! I just won a Flip Mino and a few months ago I won a Tassimo Coffee maker plus about $100 worth of coffee. So twitter is definitely still my friend. I do use it for getting links out to my site but definitely don't count on it as a main promotional tool.
ciarandoyle
02. Mar, 2010
Hi Angela,
Great, i have never thought of it as a way to win prizes, I suppose people are trying to find ways in which they can monetize their posts and giveaways is obviously working for them…
Let me know what you have been looking at
Cheers
Ciaran
angelawills
02. Mar, 2010
Do you mean where I won the prizes?
Well @freshbooks did a giveaway where they were giving out prizes every 15 minutes just before valentine's day if you told them why you love your gig. I told them and won a flip that's branded with their logo – pretty cool.
And @tassimocanada was giving away a bunch of their machines, you just had to tweet that you wanted one to the twitter person assigned to give them away (in my case @ErinBlaskie had a few she was authorized to give away).
They were pretty cool uses of twitter and I definitely am a happy camper in regards to how much I love Tassimo and Freshbooks, lol.
hmmm… seems this might be turning into a blog post of my own about using twitter for giveaways
ciarandoyle
02. Mar, 2010
Hi Joseph,
You would be surprised at how many people use twitter as their main focus of their marketing, just have a look at what courses there is out on the marketplace solely dedicted to twitter. An internet marketer like yourself is well aware of the benefits of having alot of marketing mediums to get their message across to the marketplace but the amount of new marketers that have been duped into thinking that twitter is the new, teh best and really the only place to market has sadly exploded.
In terms of what I mean by Twitter not monetizing…
They do not currently have a form of income bar selling search engine results to larger search engines. At present they are looking into an ad network format where people will be able to buy ads on their search facility, but from what I have read it doesnt seem like too much.
Twitter most likely has quite an amount of operating expense seeing as it does have about 75 million users, i dont know the ins and out of technical ops that goes into teh back end, but i dont think it is cheap.
In terms of keeping it going just for the heck of it, who knows, there has been a massive decline in its use as followers are being diluted more and more with all the new “add me” softwares.
Also twitter has a huge drop off rate of about 60% after the first month which means that they are finding it hard to keep people on board.
According to Neilsen research:
Twitter’s() retention rate compared to Facebook() and MySpace() in the early days is not very good.
“Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out…we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.”
I know this is a bit of an old post (10 months) but it does beg the question, does twitter have life?
All we have to do is wait and see Joseph,
If you are still doing great with it then you keep going on it, and what i did mention in my post is to start looking at different avenues, so that the people who are solely on twitter need to start looking elsewhere.
Cheers for the great comment
Ciaran
ciarandoyle
02. Mar, 2010
Hi Joseph,
You would be surprised at how many people use twitter as their main focus of their marketing, just have a look at what courses there is out on the marketplace solely dedicted to twitter. An internet marketer like yourself is well aware of the benefits of having alot of marketing mediums to get their message across to the marketplace but the amount of new marketers that have been duped into thinking that twitter is the new, teh best and really the only place to market has sadly exploded.
In terms of what I mean by Twitter not monetizing…
They do not currently have a form of income bar selling search engine results to larger search engines. At present they are looking into an ad network format where people will be able to buy ads on their search facility, but from what I have read it doesnt seem like too much.
Twitter most likely has quite an amount of operating expense seeing as it does have about 75 million users, i dont know the ins and out of technical ops that goes into teh back end, but i dont think it is cheap.
In terms of keeping it going just for the heck of it, who knows, there has been a massive decline in its use as followers are being diluted more and more with all the new “add me” softwares.
Also twitter has a huge drop off rate of about 60% after the first month which means that they are finding it hard to keep people on board.
According to Neilsen research:
Twitter’s() retention rate compared to Facebook() and MySpace() in the early days is not very good.
“Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out…we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.”
I know this is a bit of an old post (10 months) but it does beg the question, does twitter have life?
All we have to do is wait and see Joseph,
If you are still doing great with it then you keep going on it, and what i did mention in my post is to start looking at different avenues, so that the people who are solely on twitter need to start looking elsewhere.
Cheers for the great comment
Ciaran
ciarandoyle
04. Mar, 2010
Thats awesome, and a great idea for a bit of money making goodness
Everyone likes free stuff.
Cheers
Ciaran
Cathy Fletcher
15. Mar, 2010
Good points all!
I've been learning online marketing for just a year and it's a fascinating subject to be sure.
Eben Pagan sent out an email that I picked up a year ago suggesting Twitter. While learning to drive traffic to a blog, all my traffic came from Twitter (4,000 visits) just by tweeting once or twice a day. But I haven't learned to convert traffic only to entertain. I keep my number low on Twitter, look at each person and generally only follow people that found me by tweet search. Then I keep cleaning up with Twellow by viewing the non-mutuals.
Usually I block everyone without a head, or with flesh images & sex words, people with no tweets, or no picture, or a weird name, extreme new agers, people that swear, people that flame or have odd middle-eastern logos on their hat that translates to “I want to kill you to get into heaven”. Yes I check stuff. The auto DM, auto follow, auto tweets are not cool.
In the summer will outsource to a high school girl taking marketing to look at followers that were there before lists came along and sort them out.
The reason I use Twitter is I've found stuff I never would have found otherwise, I buy sometimes, and I can get my finger on the pulse of the public, learn things. It's a small world, and bought some glass tea lite holders from a business woman that turned out to be strongly connected with my best friend and her sister who used to babysit all 6 of my brothers and sisters and me. Still in touch and on FB.
But Twitter can get out of hand quickly. That being said there's always that one person who is a gold mine because they are an actual living breathing person that will promote others because they love to.
FB for me is extremely private, I must have actually met you in person because my friends and family are on there. And I don't play games, join random groups. Our business group has a business page just up, and people are talking about FB ads that it's friendly to even affiliate marketers like Google ads used to be.
Ciaran, thank you for this post…Armand Morin and Michel Fortin are neat to learn from