To Tweet or not to Tweet - that is the question?
In three years our understanding of twittering has evolved from a slightly bizarre conversation about the dawn chorus to a new global communications platform.
While many can talk about Twitter across the dinner table, as communicators do we really understand what it can do for us all and how we can harness it. Madano’s digital head, Andy Trickett takes the plunge.
It’s official – Twitter is a phenomenon!
Since it’s inception in 2006, Twitter has grown from a niche, geeky ‘microblogging’ service to a global phenomenon. From students and pensioners to Stephen Fry and Barack Obama, everyone, it seems is having a ‘tweet’ and sharing their activities and musing with the wider world using 140 characters or less.
Growth has been sensational. Neilson showed Twitter web traffic to have increased by 1382% between February 2008 and 2009. By comparison, Facebook grew by around 225% over the same period to around 65.7 million visitors.
At present, this meteoric rise shows no signs of stopping or even slowing, with some predicting 50 million users worldwide by summer. Whilst some surges can be put down to stunts such as the Ashton Kutcher/CNN race for 1 million followers, the pervasiveness of the service is rapidly increasing.
Breaking into the commercial mainstream
Celebrities and big brands are beginning to find their place in the Twitter ecosystem targeting customers and stakeholders in a completely new way. Whether Will Carling ‘talking’ rugby or Dell offering Twitter only deals on its hardware (and making an extra $1 million as a direct result over the Christmas trading period), Twitter is becoming a highly effective channel for communicating with current and prospective audiences.
A new source of breaking news
But as well as a commercial channel, this year has also seen the service start to evolve as the first place for breaking news. So far in 2009, Twitter users have been the first to report on and post photos of breaking news - from bomb blasts in Mumbai and earthquakes (last year in China, this year in the UK) to the well documented US elections and the London G20 protests.
The power of real-time search
However, since the acquisition of Summize last summer, Twitter has provided users – individuals and corporates – with the ability to search all Tweets available on the public timeline.
The widespead adoption of the delightfully named - hashtags - has allowed us all with an easy way to follow content belonging to a certain subject. Try searching #SwineFlu, #G20 and #Skittles at Twitter and see what it throws up?
This ability to search and track trending topics and news in real-time is what sets it apart from search engines such as Google.
Its results reflect an ongoing social conversation rather than an index of day old content.
Technology guru John Borthwick describes this latent power of twitter really well – ‘Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know what’s happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.’
Update : Google announced additional search options on 12th May, including real-time search.
Not all plain sailing
Twitter’s ability to enlighten however, can equally be matched by its propensity to confuse and muddy. For example, the H1N1/Swine Flu story accounted for around 10% of all Twitter traffic globally in the first few days of its outbreak. But unfortunately, its value as an authoritative news source was significantly damaged by the large numbers of users posting misinformation, especially around pork products and the spread of disease.
So what is next?
Well, there is of course the great possibility that a young pretender in any aspect of online search may well find themselves the subject of an even larger bid from the giants such as those at Google. This week, in fact, has seen a new rumour – that Apple may bid for Twitter, although the fit is hard to see.
But assuming Twitter has wings – and we think it does – what is next?
This year is certain to see Twitter continue to grow and maybe even get close to Facebook in terms of unique users. For now there is no sign that the little blue bird is running out of tweets, though there are concerns that its retention rates are low. It is big and people are interested in it so companies have to have strategies to deal with it.
Twitters popularity is also demonstrated by the vibrant community of developers producing new applications that are built around it. Twitdom, an online directory of applications, currently lists over 720 for getting the most out of Twitter. From the do-it-all applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic to the more focussed StockTwits for following investment information, there’s something for everyone. This wealth of new applications will make the space easier to navigate, understand and analyse.
It will continue to grow as a source of news and information and as such corporates will have to monitor, analyse and find ways of shaping agenda’s in just the same way as they currently do in the traditional world of broadcast, print or standard digital media.
Finally, we think that there is huge potential in analytics around consumer or customer behaviour which could be of very real value to big brands. Already we’re seeing sites such as Twibs.com and trackingtwitter.com emerge to list and rate businesses and brands. The trick will be to be able to filter the inane chatter from an ever growing pool of data.
So, while there are clearly issues to iron out with Twitter, all modern communicators will have to navigate this new world, face up to its challenges and exploit its widespread opportunities.
