Twitter is 4 years old!

For something that was sniffed at by many it has turned out to be a web marketing phenomenon. Looking at some of the stats, it seems its a business plan many people wish they had thought of first:

It’s worth $100 billion

It has a Growth Rate of 200% year on year

There are 26 million users

the UK has the 2nd largest Twitter Fan Base after the USA

Most importantly for you is that out of every 350 visits to a website 1 of them will come from twitter, a figure that cannot be matched by any other traffic directing website.

The question many are asking is what next?

Over the years we are writing less but we are writing more often:

1999: A company website was a must have. It meant writing pages of information and thousands of words…but you only wrote it once.

2005: Blogs were all the rage, you wrote a couple of posts/articles a couple of times

2007: Facebook extended beyond the universities and everyone was updating their status writing 100 words a couple of times a week (or more if you are a self confessed addict!)

2008: Twitter took hold and people were telling the world their news in 140 characters a couple of times a day (or if you are Stephen Fry this reached over 100 per day)

2009: Facebook tried to keep up by changing the way it displayed status updates….and it looked suspiciously twittified.

Facebook however manages to hold peoples interest. Its retention rate for registered users is 70% where Twitter is only 40%. of the 300 million or more Facebook users 140 million of them claim to log in daily. Whereas 65.5% of people registered with Twitter claiming to be PR professionals have never posted a Tweet.

One thing that can be concluded is that there is a definite increase in the number of words being said…even if it does mean you say them lots of times. The discerning web user doesn’t have time to trawl through websites and blogs, they want information in as fewer words as possible (something that will please Tony at Realnet – he has been saying this for years). So what’s the next web phenomenon…summing everything up in just one word?

Probably not, but it is still moving towards less is more with videos and photos and a whole range of new media that you need to be thinking about.

But just in case it turns out to be ‘what goes around comes around’ I’m going to call my next post blogging for business!

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