Twitter is becoming part of the fabric of search
Deals announced in the past couple of days will soon see status updates/ tweets added to the search results of both Microsoft’s Bing and Google search result pages (SERP). The sheer volume of information being entered in to twitter every minute has long been eyed up by the likes of Microsoft and Google as it offers them ‘real time’ search through topic trends, an area that even Google has publicly admitted it is lagging behind. This deal with twitter will give them access to instant and constantly evolving information their spiders could never hope to compete with, and it gives twitter its first major source of revenue!
It has its own eco-system
An entire eco-system has sprung up using the twitter platform such as twitter alerts, tweet scheduling, back tweet analysis, polls, group tweets, pictures, backgrounds, advertising… the list goes on. The more developers that come on board to create new tools and applications based upon Twitter’s platform the more likely people are going to find a use for it.
The sheer size of its user base
When it comes down to it, the number of people who use Twitter is massive! Although growth has started to slow down, it still pulls in close to 25 million unique visitors from the USA alone, as shown by compete.com’s unique visitor statistics.
Should you be on Twitter?
A lot of webmasters and business have jumped on board Twitter without really asking why? As with any form of marketing, be it newspapers, Email marketing, or paid search, Twitter is not suitable for everyone. But the reasons why you should not be on Twitter should be based upon those factors and not because you think it will have gone by 2010. It is important to understand Twitter is now firmly established as a major source of traffic for websites, a revenue generator for supporting businesses and is soon to become a vital source of data for the search engines so any question of whether it is simply a short term fad should be dismissed.
Twitter is certainly experiencing explosive growth, but we have to remember that this is a company that still does not have a business plan (Nov 2009 wired.com) beyond capturing 1 billion users. They face difficult times ahead turning a $1 million a year revenue into something to offer a return on $150 million invested WITHOUT annoying and alienating users. Ironically, user dissent travels fast in an interconnected world!
Having said that I am using Twitter in more and more on line strategies, mainly because I like the way you can find people that many be relevant via the instant search, and build on line relationships quickly. I’ve met some very interesting people via Twitter, and connected with some of my heroes of the business and adventure world.
Of course the caveat is – where is the ROI in using Twitter? This is the thing that anyone using it for business must ask, and measure. On the whole, we see very low returns coming from Twitter traffic compared with say, Google traffic. So as ever, measure and assess your marketing efforts, even if they are as fun as Twittering.
Jeremy Webb
Internet Marketing Consultant.