Nielsen reports today that Twitter is growing very fast.
Twitter.com continues to grow in popularity and importance in both the consumer and corporate worlds. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, it has evolved into an important component of brand marketing. Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month. Zimbio and Facebook followed, growing 240 percent and 228 percent,
Now Twitter is growing and that’s great for them. I have no problem with it. But to those who use it as proof that Twitter is now “mainstream” I’d ask them one question: Why do you think Twitter is growing?
Twitter, up until a few months back, had been a tool of the geeky-elite. Basically your TechCrunch reading crowd. But as it happens there’s another group of people who read TechCrunch and that’s marketers. As news of Twitter traveled through that community it eventually landed on the doorstep of the “Image Consultant”
Now the Image Consultant is an interesting beast. They basically make their money by trying to prove they’re hip and cool to people who are actually hip and cool so those people will pay them to give advice on how to stay hip and cool. Because those actual hip and cool people fear one thing more than anything else and that’s the day they stop being hip and cool.
So they pay Image Consultants to help them jump on the bandwagon of every fad in existence.
Which is where Twitter comes in. Image consultants are now telling their clients that Twitter is “the hot thing to do". So you have Shaq, Lindsey, et al. tweeting away on Twitter now.
This draws in the TMZ crowd who love raw celebrity gossip and that is where Twitter’s growth is coming from. Now that’s great for Twitter, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t mean they’ve become mainstream. It simply means they’re playing to a slightly larger audience now.
So basically what I’m saying is when this…
Equals more than this…
Plus this…
I’ll begin to consider the notion that Twitter is going mainstream. Right now I think it’s just latched on to a slightly larger niche.