Twitter: Aging in Reverse?
There is an interesting read on mashable.com about increased Twitter usage by young people. We’ve been working with some institutions on social media solutions, and I’m wondering if this means we will see an increased use in this platform by colleges and universities that serve traditional-age students.
A highlight from the mashable article regarding trends in Twitter demographics: “In other words, unlike popular social sites before it – most notably Facebook and MySpace – Twitter is actually ‘aging in reverse,’ first gaining popularity with older users and only later teens and young adults.”
Social media and it’s growth, as we’ve seen, is difficult to predict. Some providers have focused on creating platforms (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Tumblr) where people can easily feed in a variety of links and media types, and Twitter lies on the other end of that spectrum. It’s almost the anti-Facebook; there are no ads, no goofy applications, no quizzes, and no rich media. You get 140 characters per post and that’s it, so each thought or link is usually fairly self-contained. If you want to link rich media you can still do it, but the Twitter service itself does not embed the media in your post. There are only two options for relating to other users: follow or don’t follow… Twitter has no groups, calendars, no fan pages, and no polls. Twitter makes its users communicate in a way that is arguably much simpler than the social media platforms that have have come before it.
In an age of information where “more is more” can a strategy that is focused on providing less actually work?
My theory is yes. I believe that Twitter and microblogging platforms like Twitter are going to continue to grow in popularity for a few reasons:
Sometimes, less is more. As we’ve seen, Facebook is increasingly filled with apps, ads, and robust media. In a best case scenario, robust media means a more immersive experience, and in a worst case scenario, it means you have to wade through a lot of irrelevant details to actually see what your friends are doing. The way Twitter distributes content is more like an RSS feed. So you can see what people are up to without having to do as much mental sifting.
Shorter, more informal communication seems to be the benchmark of social media. Twitter is kind of on the leading edge of this, because they give you hard cap on characters per post. The Twitter rule set forces you to be concise, even more so when providing a link. While it’s not quite as short as texting from a mobile phone, it’s the same kind of communication as texting. This is another reason I think we’ll see Twitter usage continue to increase with young people.
It’s flexible. The Twitter API is extremely easy to repurpose (i.e. RSS feeds), integrate with social networks that are trying to be a platform (like Facebook), or analyze (sites such as wefollow.com). Twitter isn’t trying to do everything, it’s just trying to do one thing really well. It’s less like a platform, and more like a good tool that can fit into just about any toolbox.
I’m fully aware that the future, and the fickle public may prove me wrong. For now, I’m going to keep an eye on the growth of Twitter and its changing demographics.
I disagree.. my own personal commentary.. I think Twitter’s life cycle is coming to a close and that you will begin to see a decline in usage even though someone may have noted an increase in followers. I am sensing that Twitter will go the same way as mySpace and will be overcome by the next best thing. It may be a victim of its own success. The more followers a particular person has, the quicker replies are pushed down and the harder it is to follow a string of thoughts. The simplicity, which draws many new users, quickly makes usage become stale. It’s understandable why it is shifting to the younger generation and the comparison between the tweets and texting… This same factor that makes it nice to toss out a few quick ideas makes it much less useful when trying to cover any topic in depth.
I think it still has a place for the younger crowd and keeping up to date with the latest celebrity gossip, but will become less and less useful for accomplishing anything. The most redeeming feature is the ability to search which makes it a quick method to get a number of views on a particular topic, but not a great way for any in depth understanding. A quick way to measure the pulse on any one topic. It’s very much like a water cooler.. a great way to get a general feeling about something but if you want real information you’re going to end up talking one-on-one at the persons desk.
The final nail in Twitter’s coffin for real use may be the number off add/bulletins, spam that have found their way into the service. Sure, they don’t have add/apps like Facebook, but many micro-blogs are now simple advertisements in themselves rather than being contained in the side-bar.
So.. do I think Twitter will die anytime soon? No. I do, however, think that it will end up being pushed to such high level conversations that it only helps direct people to more useful sources of information and as a very personal experience between friends to keep people in contact (which will probably be used mostly by the younger crowd).
Posted on September 7, 2009 by Kevin Zink
I have the opposite criticism of your assessment… you didn’t go far enough. My take is that Twitter is going to eclipse Facebook, mySpace and all the other social networks before ultimately taking up position next to blogs as the publishing outlet of choice.
I think people get it wrong when they talk about Twitter as social media or a social network… it’s both of those things but it’s also a whole lot more. It’s essentially a communication platform that’s totally agnostic about how you use it and that makes it a whole lot more valuable and flexible.
My predictions for the future:
1) Blog usage will continue to increase.
Individual blogs and bloggers continue to be created and we eventually (soon) saturate because everyone that ever wanted a blog has one and so now there’s an overwhelmingly volume of stuff out there. I think we’ll start to see many bloggers who aren’t actually creating much content so much as curating it. Kottke.org is a good example.
Kottke’s valuable because he wades through the stuff for me and highlights the things he finds most valuable and relevant. Because he and I overlap in terms of interests I can trust him to do a lot of my mindless browsing for me. So I just get to check-in with his site every other day and get turned on to a dozen or so things he found interesting (few of which he had any part in creating).
2) Twitter is gonna EXPLODE. People are using it more and more and this is just the beginning.
3) Facebook / mySpace: flatline. They’re not going away but they’ve gonna run a distant third behind the other two.
Posted on September 7, 2009 by Patrick DiMichele
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Twitter.
It just doesn’t seem to have exploded the way Facebook has. Maybe “Twitter is texting 2.0” is the most I can give it.
Like, maybe Twitter users are to texters as Facebook users are to people who actually talk on the phone. If that’s the case, I can see Twitter someday replacing texting as a means of communication, but if it ever got more complicated than that, it wouldn’t really be Twitter anymore.
Posted on September 7, 2009 by Laurel Hechanova
I’ll add one more thing to the Twitter isn’t social media thread: in an article from TechCrunch (http://ow.ly/oxJe) Twitter lists ways Facebook could kill it: “adopting real-time search, changing the opt-in options to make status messages public, emphasizing its SMS features, and generally copying Twitter’s functionality and user-interface (all of which have started to happen).”
It seems Twitter recognizes itself as a medium, more or less, that can be effectively replaced by a few additional features on Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see how this race shakes out.
Posted on September 8, 2009 by Laurel Hechanova