In a recent report posted on eMarketer.com, Neilsen had shown a slow down in traffic to Twitter.com – a decline of nearly 30% in one month. What does that mean? You have to also take into account that Twitter users have and will continue to grow (double digits in 2010) as more learn how to incorporate it in their daily personal and professional lives. In my view, the decline in traffic to Twitter.com means absolutely nothing. It may just be inevitable.
Like email, Twitter is pure function –the ability to broadcast to an audience regardless of size, location and technical platform. Put aside this core function, Twitter.com provides very little end user value. Here are ways people are tweeting today without Twitter.com.
Twitter Feeds On 3rd Party Sites
More and more content owners have complimented their user experiences with Twitter feeds. This has help web managers increase their site visitors through increased reach and exposure of content through user tweets and retweets. Integrated Twitter feeds also help keep visitors engaged on their sites without the user leaving the host site. This doesn’t help Twitter because this traffic doesn’t actually see Twitter.com.
Desktop & Mobile Access
There are growing numbers of desktop, mobile and other web based applications that have expanded on the core Twitter functionality. Apps like TweetDeck are available as a desktop and mobile application. TD offers a far more engaging experience to track and post your tweets. Other apps like Buzzom’s TWITin enables users to search and expand your network and manage your relationships. As users continue to adopt twittering, managing multiple accounts will become challenging. I see this being similar to some email clients that enable users to manage all of their accounts from a single dashboard.
Social Media Integration
Another growing trend is with Twitter integration on other social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter and most recently LinkedIn have site-to-site status updates. As social media platforms continue to grow – integration will help users keep sane as they try to manage their broadcasts to all of their networks.
Twitter Like Email
Tweeting will continue to grow and become an integral part of our digital communication – just like email. Like email, the ability to tweet is platform agnostic and won’t require a site to do so. As tweeting becomes more accessible it will continue to have commercial and social success. And to end I can see that to tweet will out live Twitter.com.
