Trifling Twitter | Monday Note
2105:
3 / Twitter’s pervasiveness has nothing in common with what we observe on Facebook or Google. As a business, Twitter’s trajectory looks more like Yahoo’s (unfortunately in a more precocious way) than a Google’s or Facebook’s. Zuckerberg’s social network enjoys unabated growth and much better monetization: it extracts about $3 in revenue per user (and makes a profit at it) versus $0.25 for Twitter.
This gap allows Facebook to continuously roll out new features. As a result, its already faithful users end up even more solidly anchored, increasing their time spent on the service. Twitter, on the other hand, has yet to show a sustainable business model, and its small core of heavy users remains difficult to monetize. This results in a hard to break vicious circle: no cash-flow => no investment capacity => costly investments due to a theoretically large user base. Twitter’s inability to introduce new sticky features is likely to further concentrate the twitterer base, while the broader circle of less involved users will tend to look elsewhere for excitement.It will be difficult for Twitter’s management and investors to find their way out of this decaying orbit.
Already, Twitters’s limitations are visible in the way users consume online news. According the a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism and based on Nielsen data (PDF here), Twitter is an insignificant referral (1%) for news when compared to Facebook (5%) or Google (30%). However, the use of Twitter deserves to be encouraged in the newsroom (and taught in journalism schools), since:
a) it is an effective promotional tool for value-added stories;
b) it allows reporters to actually pinpoint their most loyal audience – and establish a relationship with it;
c) it doesn’t kill value like RSS feeds do (see a previous Monday Note on that matter).I lost this perspective-reasserting Monday Note in a forest of tabs. Very glad I finally got to it—it captures a number of things about the Twitter user base that I couldn’t see clearly. I highly recommend you go read the whole thing.
Even since yesterday when I queued this post, it is fascinating to reconsider it in light of the Apple IO5 announcements today. (Oh, and apologies for reblogging myself.)
(Source: journo-geekery)
