As a digital marketer I’m always looking for trends in the vehicles that I use in my quarterly and yearly campaigns. Obviously the growth of Twitter in 2009 has been tremendous. You’re seeing adoption from all walks of life and across many usage models. What’s interesting, however, is that we have seen a trend over the last four months that shows the growth of this micro-blogging service as slowed…and effectively flat-lined in the US:
This is a curious phenomenon, as Mashable reports since the service has “entered pop culture, it’s been the web buzzword of the year, everyone from NFL players to rock stars are tweeting. We’ve seen hundreds of exciting services and ideas built around Twitter in the past two years.” (Courtesy: Mashable).
I continue to build a Twitter component into all of our Social Media programs that come out of my group at Intel. From my perspective, it’s a valuable and easy way for individuals to contribute to a community that we are developing – such as the MyLifeScoop program I blogged about earlier this week. While growth has slowed for the moment, there is no doubt in my mind that as Ev and Biz continue to broker agreements with industry leaders we will see audience uptake spike again.
Tweetedbrands.com lists out the daily Top 50 Brands in the Twitterverse. Intel makes the list…today. I’d like to see us maintain our place and gain momentum.
We (Intel) have done some great executions with Pandora this year. What I admire most about them is their willingness to innovate, and tailor programs for a client like me.
Today the service just got better, in my opinion. I am a heavy user of Pandora and find myself discovering new songs that I bookmark, but always seem to forget to share. Now, with the capability to share through Twitter, Facebook, and ‘Give the Gift’ of Music – users are able to provide those in their network a real-time ‘listen in’ to what they are playing on Pandora. From Tom Conrad, Pandora CTO:
“It’s sort of our version of making a mix tape for someone” (courtesy: TechCrunch)
I used to make mix-tapes all the time growing up…now I have a new way to share my favorites. Well played Tom, Tim, and the rest of the Pandora crew.
The inevitable has happened. There has been a youth uprising on Twitter, with new data showing that over the last year the largest growing age group on the micro-blogging service is the 18-24 y/o demo (37% gain year over year), with the 25-34 y/o demo following closely (31% growth in the same time period). While the media age (31) has remained stable it is clear that our youth, once hesitant about the transparency of broadcasting their every move in 140 characters, has shed their trepidation and are swarming to Twitter like never before. Very different data than we saw just two short months ago.
“Internet users age 18-44 report rapid uptake of Twitter over the last nine months, whereas internet users ages 45 and older report slower adoption rates. For example, 37% of internet users age 18-24 use Twitter or another service, up from 19% in December 2008.” (credit: Pew Internet)
According to a recently released report by the research group Interpret LLC:
“Twitter users are twice as likely to review or rate products online (24% vs. 12%), visit company profiles (20% vs. 11%) and click on advertisements or sponsors (20% vs.9%) as those who only belong to traditional social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace. The data suggests that Twitter users uniquely demonstrate higher engagement with brands, not just with “tweets” they post.“ (credit: All Things Digital)
This is an interesting finding, especially when you consider that 20% of Tweets mention Brands and Products, according to Researchers at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Message to Brand Marketers, if you’re not already looking at Twitter as a community that is receptive to your message – you should be.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? Twitter – be flattered – Facebook loves your @ reply functionality. Either that, or they are kicking themself for not thinking of it first. This capability was announced last week and will begin rollout to users this week. I experienced for the first time today…with a little green pop-up box asking if I wanted to tag anyone in my status update. It’s essentially the same as ‘tagging’ someone in a photo, whereby it also gives the friend you included in your status the ability to ‘untag’ themselves (something you can not do with a Twitter @reply). While this is a useful social feature for Facebook users to include friends in their status, let’s be clear that this data also helps Facebook continue it’s emphasis on ‘structured data’ and assists in profiling users for more targeted advertising by companies contracting with Facebook – as AllFacebook points out:
“Information attributed to an individual user helps us paint a picture of that individual’s personality as well as their general habits. In addition to giving Facebook ad developers greater access to understanding a user, it also is extremely useful for producing more effective communication.“
Survey says… The Web. I must admit, I am surprised by the report released by Rapleaf this week. They did their due diligence in establishing a large sample size (4M Twitter users) to provide an accurate assessment of how people are using the Twitter service and plethora of tools available to them. The statistic that surprises me the most is the amount of people (65%) that are still using the Twitter.com Web Site as their means of pushing their 140 character message out to their followers. With the variety of great tools out there to augment your Twitter experience like Twhirl and TweetDeck, I would think that more people would be leveraging those to streamline their Twitter activities. Not true. In fact, the second largest segment of the pie are people sending out their Tweets via text on their mobile phone. That begs the question – what do you use to Tweet?
As you can tell from my blog, I am a big sports fan and very involved in social media. I’ve blogged about Twitter and Athletes on severaloccasions before and continue to enjoy the ‘unfiltered’ access we get to our favorite sports icons. Today, while doing some research for a Tweetshop I am co-hosting for the Portland Chapter of the AMA, I came across a very interesting video on ESPN.com discussing Twitter and Athletes. It’s worth the 8 minutes to watch it in it’s entirety – you’ll discover all is not what it appears to be on Twitter with your favorite athlete.
This is a hot topic on Twitter today…breaking down the age group demographic of the most active participants on the micro-blogging service. Nielsen released their findings last week on their site and you can see from the chart below that the age range most likely to be using Twitter is the 24-54 year old demo. What’s interesting (and I mention this same data several months ago) is that the 55+ demo outpaces the % of Teen users as well. Does Twitter have a solution to reach what most companies consider their most valuable age audience? Time will tell – but so far, the answer is no.
We (Intel) have done some 
