In many ways, Twitter is much more of a competitor to other “discovery tools” and “information sources” than it is to Facebook. Once again, for most users it’s more about what you hear, learn, and find than the fact that you can tweet. And the majority of the users get value from “reading” or “listening” to the tweets from these core influencers. The majority of the tweets on Twitter are posted by a small sub-set of the users. Just as Facebook is symmetric in terms of its poster-reader relationship, Twitter is highly asymmetric. With Twitter, you get news faster, you see updates from your favorite artists, you hear directly from key politicians, and gain insights from influencers in a wide variety of specializations. It’s a “discovery engine” and an “information utility” rolled into one. Other Internet networks like to keep the user “inside.” Much like Google, Twitter points out to the world. While it is amazingly democratic and allows literally anyone to broadcast publicly as a “tweeter,” the core value in today’s Twitter is the amazing flow of curated and customized information that emanates from its crowd-sourced user feeds. Twitter is an innovative and remarkable information service. For the vast majority of Twitter’s next 900 million users, the core usage modality will have very little to do with “tweeting,” and everything to do with “listening” or “hearing.” But this completely misses the point as to why Twitter has become such an amazingly powerful Internet destination for 100 million others. “Why would I tweet?,” and “…but I don’t want to tweet” are two common refrains from the non-adopter that highlight this key misperception. For many non-Twitter users, Twitter is an intimidating proposition. The second, and more critical, Twitter misperception is that you need to tweet, to have something to say and broadcast, for the service to be meaningful to you.
For those with this perception, the notion of potentially exposing their own private thoughts to the broad public Internet is overwhelming and uninteresting. For the people who view Twitter as a Facebook variant, they immediately assume the platform’s core purpose is for the user to broadcast his or her own thoughts and personal information (like Facebook), but to a much broader public audience.
In fact, users react quite negatively when this information is unknowingly shared more broadly. Any potential anxiety with regards to Facebook sharing is reduced by the fact that these communications are generally seen only by one’s friends. But on Twitter, I can get something out of following Shaquile O’Neil who has no social obligation to follow me back.Īs its roots are in communication, a key part of the Facebook value proposition is sharing information. The only way magic happens on Facebook is through reciprocity: I friend you and you friend me back – then information flows. Twitter, on the other hand, is a one-to-many information broadcast network. Facebook is a few-to-few communication network designed for sharing information and life events with friends. The press frequently positions the two together as “leaders in social networking.” This pairing erroneously implies that the two services are used for the exact same thing, even though the two platforms are very different. People commonly think of Twitter as a variant of Facebook. The first misperception is that Twitter is simply another social network, like Facebook. Twitter suffers from two key misperceptions that need to be resolved before the business can reach its true potential. Yet despite these impressive strides, Twitter’s upside is far, far greater and its user base will expand by an order of magnitude – as soon as the service can overcome a major perception problem.
And Twitter, along with its verb form “tweet”, have become words in everyday usage all over the world. It has become an indispensable tool for managing personal and corporate brands. So, Twitter’s traffic has been growing in leaps and bounds. Even uber-socialist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has 2.24 million followers (which puts him slightly behind Mandy Moore, but just ahead of Queen Latifah). Global news in any region breaks first and spreads fast on Twitter. No one would consider running for public office without a strong Twitter presence. Every news and sports program proudly advertises its Twitter account handle. Most top actors, athletes, and artists are all active on Twitter. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. Filed under: advertising, Facebook, Internet, IPO, social networking, Twitter, Uncategorized, Venture Capital, Web/Tech | Tags: Facebook, Google, Internet, Twitter, Venture Capital | Frequent comparisons to Facebook leave many confused about the true value of Twitter.