Twitter’s cautionary whale.
For those of you not yet connected on Twitter, this picture on the right has become a frequent sight to Twitter users. This wildly popular micro-blogging platform was the belle of the ball at SxSW two years ago and is one of the first major social networking sites outside of Facebook and Myspace to gain popularity. Twitter is addictive and infuriating. Plagued by infrastructure problems associated with rapid (and apparently unexpected) growth Twitter suffers from increasingly frequent downtime and is a thorn in the side of early adopters who have spent considerable time growing their network.
The problem it seems, is that while social media sites popped up daily over the last year, Twitter is flat out popular and unrivaled in the micro-blogging space. Despite all the downtime lately, Twitter’s momentum seems to have actually deterred competition rather than encourage it - an act that is fairly unique in the tech space. Certainly sites have tried, Pownce and more recently Plurk have entered the “stream of consciousness” micro-blogging movement, but for whatever reason can’t seem to get momentum (beyond early-adopters.)
It’s not clear what the magic ingredient is (probably timing) but Twitter isn’t going away anytime soon. For all it’s problems, it’s still a great way to network online. It’s a double-edge sword for social marketers - Twitter results rank well on Google and it’s a pretty easy way to grow your social network. The caution comes from planning too much of your social media strategy around Twitter. With such inconsistent uptime, and the possibility of users getting turned off and flocking to other services, it’s important to dedicate some attention to other micro-blogging with your social media strategy. Twitter is great, but beware the whale.
Tags: Blog Marketing, micro-blogging, social-networking, twitter