Wall Street Journal: “Twitter goes mainstream”

October 27th, 2008

At Liberate Media we are continually telling our clients and brands we meet with that they should not be ignoring Twitter. The micro-blogging tool is still seem by many as the domain of the geeks and early adopters, but this is a false perception - it is now crossing into many mainstream sectors and communities.

Today’s article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Twitter goes mainstream” nicely supports this point. The article reads: “When the service first appeared a couple of years ago, its appeal seemed largely limited to narcissists who wanted to let everybody know what they were doing in real time. But, like blogs and social-networking sites, Twitter is starting to cross into the mainstream, as a wide range of people find interesting uses for the brief notes.”

By way of example, I follow an ambulance driver, Working Lunch, Dell, BBC News etc… The potential for all businesses should not be underestimated. For example, I’m sure Twitter would be great for estate agents wanting to let buyers know about houses that have just been reduced, or for car manufacturers to let customers know about new upgrades that they have coming out, or for restaurants to let residents know about daily specials etc. The opportunities are endless.

Unfortunately, Twitter does not disclose user data, and so historically it’s been difficult to offer clients demographic statistics about the platform. The company has said to the Wall Street Journal that the number of active users rose sevenfold in the past year. The article quantifies it in this way: “Twitter.com had more than a million unique visitors from the U.S. in August 2008, up from just 282,000 in August 2007, according to research firm comScore Inc. Those numbers are likely to underestimate overall usage, much of which happens on mobile phones.”

Digging a little deeper, a fairly recent article by US Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer for Time magazine claimed that:

• Males make up 63% of Twitterers, specifically males from California
• Today the site’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds, who make up 25.9% of its users
• The first group of users, type H03 (14.7% of Twitter visitors), a.k.a the “Stable Career,” comprises a “collection of young and ethnically diverse singles living in big-city metros like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.”
• The second largest type of Twitterer is H01 (12.3% of the site’s visitors) — or, the “Young Cosmopolitan.” These are the 40-somethings. They’re likely to drive a hybrid car such as the Toyota Prius, earn household incomes over $250,000 per year and also identify with very liberal politics.

These demographics are not conclusive though, and have an obvious US bias.

If anyone has any more Twitter stats to share, please let me know as we’d love to see them.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Emerging technology, PR, Social networking, Trends and research | No Comments »

read more

The 5 stages of Twitter from a PR perspective

July 16th, 2008

I began experimenting with Twitter at the start of the year, and in that short space of time have observed a dramatic change in usage patterns of the micro-blogging tool.

From a communications perspective, this can be broken down into different stages of adoption, which I feel offers valuable lessons in how user behaviour is evolving as a whole across social networks. Only today, within my own network of followers/followees, I felt we might be on the cusp of  a new adopter stage, and so I thought it might be a useful exercise to analyse this in my own words, to see what lessons can be learnt.

1. Discovery - at the start of the year (and admittedly the year beforehand), Twitter was very much in early adopter stage. The tech-savvy were the first to try it and decide whether or not it was a useful communications tool. This stage was characterised by a sense of ‘elite’ ownership i.e. those using it felt inspired by the fact that they were living at the cutting-edge of social media.
2. Experimentation - Twitter asks the question : ‘What are you doing?’. Following early-adopter phase, users experiment with how they can respond to this question in an interesting way, increasingly pushing the boundaries of usage. Functionality moves from basic status updates to more engaging conversation.
3. Self-promotion - as Twitter networks grow, users realise the profile-raising potential of the communications tool. Until very recently, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of people using Twitter for PR/self-promotion purposes. A growing trend has been to use the tool as a platform for seeding blog posts, product launches etc.
4. Collaboration -we’ve been heading towards this for the past month or so, but today I saw Twitter come alive as a truly collaborative tool. Social media encourages openness and honesty, and within networks Twitter can be a great place to ask advice and receive timely, expert feedback. It’s a great virtual tool for the sharing of ideas, and bouncing around of creativity.
5. Criticising - it’s bound to happen. Just as Twitter reaches its usage peak, people will start to want more than the tool is technically capable of delivering. Users will start asking “what’s next?”.

Which leaves us with ‘Migration’. I think Twitter has a bit more life left in it yet though!

Posted in Blog, Blogging, PR, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research | No Comments »

read more