As the number of Facebook users continue to skyrocket, it’s interesting to watch Twitter’s seemingly stagnant numbers. This is an important point for marketers looking to plan next year’s budget by the start of football season. Is the recent leveling off of traffic a sign that the webbernet’s favorite pony has a gimp leg or is the Type B personality-driven social tool just taking a breather?
In February, traffic to Twitter followed Facebook’s example and skyrocketed, doubling from 7MM visitors to 14MM visitors. In the next month, another impressive 30 day gain resulted in roughly 19MM visitors. However, May’s numbers saw no significant increase, according to compete.com.
Some attribute the February-April jump to the curiosity factor. Maybe it was just the blogosphere and social evangelists fueling the hordes of social gawkers. Extraordinarily high abandon rates would support this theory. However, people aren’t abandoning Twitter as if it were a fad like Jams or feathered hair. When you see the likes of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight asking viewers to follow breaking celebrity news on Twitter, you know it’s at least inching towards mainstream usage.
I personally think we’re all suffering from a bit of the Paradox of Choice when it comes to Twitter. There are simply too many tools coming out each month, too many things to learn for the average user. From hashtags to FollowFridays, FutureTweets to Friendfeeds, those outside the marketing world are likely suffering a bit of information overload. If you look at Quantcasts’s analysis of Twitter users, many of Twitter’s core users aren’t too far from the generation that had trouble programming the VCR.
I think what’s important to note is that we as marketers have to follow our Marketing 101 teachings when it comes to using sites like Twitter. Keep it simple for the audience. There will always be the 20% of our audience that keeps up with the latest tools and techniques, but 80% of those who even chose to indulge our messages on Twitter just want relevant tweets that improve their lives in some way – be it entertainment, fodder for thought leadership within their personal tribes or functional ways to make life more efficient. Follow these tips and you should be fine…at least for the next 6 months or so.
- Keep tweets well under 140 characters, this will make them more likely to be read and shared.
- Shorten links and track with bit.ly or another service
- Plan tweets ahead of time but leave room for spur of the moment updates
- Don’t use marketing speak. Be off-the-cuff and write like a real person
- Make your number one goal to provide utility, not sales
- Don’t stop tweeting, update at least 3-6 times per day
