What the Tweet?

Twitter has been controversial since it launched. I continue to hear people comment:

• It takes up too much time for too little results
• It is just meaningless drivel from self-absorbed people
• It is a spam machine

Many have jumped in and found these assessments to be true for them, and bailed out or simply just started to neglect their Twitter account. I say ‘for them’ because it may well be that they don’t understand the tool and how to best leverage Twitter.

Others haven’t jumped in at all and hold firm to the belief that it is a passing fad.

And for those who do understand some of the techniques to using Twitter and are actually accomplishing their goals and monetizing their efforts – I applaud you. On April 14 and 15, at the Chirp Conference – The Official Twitter Developers Conference held in San Francisco, Twitter released a lot of statistics, something that they don’t often or freely do. I wasn’t there, but have been reading up on the releases and bloggers who did attend.

Please take note of the statistics below that I have copied over from Jeff Bula’s blog

1. Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users (was 8 million 12 months ago – 1300 percent growth)

2. 300,000 new users sign up per day

3. Approximately 60 percent of them are coming from outside the U.S

4. Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month

5. 75 percent of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications

6. 60 percent of all tweets come from third-party apps

7. Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8 percent of new sign ups

8. There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day

9. There are over 100,000 Twitter applications

10. Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API

11. 37 percent of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet

And so you were waiting for -- what?

If you haven’t gotten any success so far, go get a cup of coffee or bottle of water, sit for a few minutes and read some of the back posts here. Several posts are focused on helping you get started or make the most of your efforts. The key to success in social media is not how powerful your marketing message is but how social you are. Yeah, not exactly what they taught you in sales and marketing boot camp.

Oh, and while we are on the topic of social media, Reuters reported on April 21, 2010:

“Since its creation in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook has emerged as one of the Internet's most popular destinations and is increasingly challenging established Web powerhouses like Yahoo Inc and Google Inc. Facebook is the fourth-most visited site in the United States, and displaced Google in January to become the top U.S. site by total number of Web pages viewed.”

The other topic trending heavily on Internet blogs, tweets and news is the focus away from the obsession of page ranking and is moving more toward traffic to your web site driven through social media. Your page rank will improve with the increase of social media activity and traffic results to your website. Stay focused on the goal, how it is achieved is different for each company and the tools and techniques are changing rapidly. So the point is that whatever you were doing may not be what you need to be doing now.