The other week I was at a prospective client and the conversation moved onto Twitter. One of the marketing team chipped in: "I think Twitter is REALLY SAD!" Then warming to her theme, "people who use Twitter should just GET A LIFE! They need to go outside a bit more!" Duly noted. I'll try and leave the cave once in a while.
But in all seriousness, it's by no means an isolated opinion. Instead, it's an extreme illustration of the biggest problem Twitter faces.
Outside of geeks and navel gazing media types like myself, most people - and indeed most marketers - still don't get what it's there for. Hence you still hear opinions along the lines of 'people just use it to post what they had for breakfast' (yep, that old chestnut is alive and well).
This fundamental problem Twitter faces is illustrated in the latest of a series of Harris polls conducted for LinkedIn (source - Marketing Charts). Two thirds of US consumers (69%) said they didn't know enough about it. Meanwhile when it came to marketers, 21% predicted it wouldn't become mainstream while 17% said it was 'already over.' This echoes a separate poll by Ragan Communications which found that most marketers considered Twitter 'a fad.'
As an aside only 8% of marketers in the Harris Poll thought Twitter was an effective promo tool. Well yes. Despite the attempts of people like pay per post service Izea to tell us otherwise, Twitter is not a good place to blast out product info (there are some exceptions - for example Dell). It is a good place to engage with customers and take your brand temperature though.
So while, according to the leaked documents published on TechCrunch, Twitter wants to become the 'pulse of the planet' it won't really reach that destination until it provides a cogent illustration of some of the things it is good for. The example published on its blog of the bakery that sends out fresh bread tweets is a start.
And I've posted before on the parallels between Twitter and the next big thing of 2007/8 - Second Life. Some comparisons are valid, some not. But one that does ring true is that the majority of the Second Life = 'Sadville' crowd was made up of people who'd never been there, or had visited once never to return.
Twitter doesn't necessarily need to become the next Facebook to thrive. The fact that it is weighted towards people who are otherwise active in social media and journalists gives it an importance beyond its numbers. But if it does want to move in this direction, it could do better than to take note of this stat from Facebook about the top applications.
According to Inside Facebook, one of the fastest growing apps is one ('We're Related') that allows families to share images and video with each other. With the fastest growing group on Facebook being older (and I'd argue more mainstream, less early adopter) consumers, Facebook has given them a clear need: Keep in touch with loved ones half way across the country or world.
That's a need that Twitter still has a way to answer.
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