Remember Twitter before November, 2008? Don’t worry, neither do most people. A year ago the microblogging juggernaut started to skyrocket in popularity as celebrities began flooding it with their own personal tweets. Once they began promoting it throughout various television interviews (e.g. Larry King Live with Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs) and infomercial-like talk show specials (e.g. Oprah) it became a nationwide tech phenomenon that everyone and their mom just had to try out.
Twitter was still a very unique beast at the time of its mainstream appearance and most new users didn’t understand it. Despite this, when notable celebs jumped on the Twitter bandwagon the rest of the world followed. The failure of new users to identify a need to tweet lingered however as Nielsen’s Twitter report so elegantly pointed out earlier this year. According to their insightful report, sixty percent of users who register never return to the site. While Nielsen’s initial stats did not account for the use of Twitter applications, the retention rate was far worse than that of major social networks like MySpace and Facebook. In lieu of heavy criticism Nielsen added 30+ websites and applications that were feeding the Twitter community to its original data set. Upon running the analysis again, Nielsen verified their initial Twitter findings that approximately 60% of people stop using the service after a month.
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Twitter’s skyrocketing growth, which had at one time bewildered so many, has since hit a wall in the U.S. The decline in the traffic growth rate for Twitter was first identified in May when Compete reported Twitter’s U.S. stats for the month of April to be depressed in comparison to traffic in March. Suspicions of Twitter peaking in the U.S. were later confirmed in June of this year when Twitter’s U.S. traffic growth rate finally plateaued just above 20 million monthly uniques where it has remained ever since.
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Twitter is still growing abroad but as for how long this will last no one knows. Perhaps more important is the contention that Twitter has lost popularity in the minds of many regular users and several celebrities. From Miley Cyrus to President Obama, our rock star deities are ditching Twitter and just saying no to tweeting. Other celebrities known to have discontinued their use of Twitter include Courtney Love, Denzel Washington, Joe Biden, and John Edwards.
If you ask President Obama, he’ll admit that he’s never personally used Twitter. He candidly explains that his thumbs are too clumsy for it and that all of his tweets originate from his staff. Such is the case for many celebrities as they frequently complain that they’re just too busy to maintain an online presence via Twitter.
As with many Twitter users, celebrities are more likely to use the service consistently if they have an actual interest in doing so. Stars such as Ashton Kutcher seem to honestly enjoy using Twitter but he’s also invested a heavy amount of time and energy tweeting with his fans so perhaps that’s why he’s so fond of it. In contrast, users that adopt Twitter solely for promotional purposes will discover that their interest level in Twitter wanes over time.
Given that celebrities have been so instrumental in its fame, will the trend of celebs kicking Twitter to the curb have the opposite effect? Celebrities, like consumers, are fickle and when the opportunity arises to follow new trends they seize the opportunity. Nielsen’s Twitter study seemed to point this out in that its service is little more than a trend to a majority of new users; something shiny and new to try out but not indispensable in their daily lives. As new communication trends emerge, will these challengers threaten Twitter to the point at which a decline in its U.S. traffic is undeniable?
Twitter has seen many of its competitors (i.e. Jaiku, Pownce) come and go in the past and it’s easy to dismiss reports of so called “Twitter killers”. On the other hand, larger companies like Facebook and Google are improving their own Twitter-like services. Facebook recently purchased FriendFeed and it’s continually updating its news feed to combat Twitter’s new features. And although Google Wave is touted as the next generation of email, it too may prove to be a realistic threat to tweeting.
It’s clear that Twitter has proven its concept and established itself as a powerful social network but the looming threat of competing services is a serious one. Some may argue that it’s highly unlikely that Twitter will ever take a tumble seeing as Google and Facebook have already taken initiatives to integrate Twitter into their own services (e.g. Google’s real time search). However, the attrition rates for Twitter users hasn’t improved and some of its most powerful promoters (i.e. celebrities) have since abandoned it. Combined with the ever growing problem of spammers and frequent bouts of service failures, it’s nearly a perfect storm for users who may want to jump ship for an easier, more straight forward service. If Google can ever find a successful way to explain just exactly what Google Wave is, how to use it, and why, the potential threat to Twitter could materialize, especially if Google adopts more Twitter features beyond “follow”.
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