eMarketing Association Blog

The eMA used Twitter about  2 months ago at our annual eMarketing Conference in San Francisco.  In that context, it provided a great forum for instant updates during the conference.  However as a network, it is lacking.  According to Nielsen more than 60% of people abandon the Twitter service after just one month.  This is a strong indication that Twitter is not really up to par with other networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook, in terms of meeting user expectations.  Additionally, significant  technical problems and excruciating slow customer service contribute to a  poor user experience.

 Unlike other networks, Twitter provides the ability to follow just about anyone, although that is not reciprocal.  In short you can read other peoples tweets, but they won’t necessarily be reading yours.  Many celebrities,  use the service to broadcast trivia to a massive number of followers.  Other users, broadcast minutia on almost an hourly basis.  After spending several weeks reviewing Twitter, my take is that, for the most part, 140 characters (the Twitter limit for tweets), encourages a massive number of banal tweets, commercialization, promotion and questionable links.   Trivia dominates the tweets along with self serving promotional messages.  I have a feeling that not many people bother to read these tweets.  Additional research suggests that 10% of tweeters post 90% of tweets, a sad statistic and indication that although there is a very active and enthusiastic segment, it is small relative to the Tweeter population.  See link below for full information on that survey.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

Nielsen Study Information

http://tinyurl.com/cyr3l7

Conclusion: There are Twitter “addicts” who just love the site, and post (mostly trivia) regularly.  The majority of users become bored and leave the service after a short time. The future of Twitter will depend on management’s ability to enhance the user experience, monetize the site, and provide significantly better customer service to users.  At this time we have no metrics or data that indicate that this service is of much value commercially or otherwise.