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posted by martyb on Sunday April 19 2015, @06:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the Twits-Twitter-for-(t)What? dept.

Twitter, the haiku-based platform beloved of the punditocracy and journalists(?), is in trouble:

According to Pew, only 23 percent of Americans over the age of 18 use Twitter. Facebook, on the other hand, is used by 71 percent of American adults. These stats by themselves don't necessarily spell disaster for the social network. Facebook has always dwarfed Twitter in size and, moreover, the platforms are fundamentally different — tweeted content reaches far beyond Twitter's digital properties to travel all over the media landscape, from other websites and apps to national television broadcasts.

What's perhaps more troubling, however, is that only 36 percent of those Twitter users visit the site daily, compared to Facebook which is visited daily by 70 percent of its users. What's worse, that number went down a full ten points from 46 percent between 2013 and 2014. Statistics like these run counter to the narrative pushed by many of the platform's defenders — and Twitter itself — that while it has far fewer users than Facebook these users experience Twitter on a deeper, more engaged level. In fact, that's the entire argument in support of Twitter's ad revenue prospects versus other more popular networks — because, frankly, its user growth has been abysmal. Last quarter Twitter added a mere 4 million users to bring its total to 288 million, which has allowed both Instagram and Pinterest — two platforms that as recently as 2012 had fewer users — to surpass it.

Me, I'm really looking forward to picking up a new Aeron chair and foosball table on the cheap at the impending Twitter HQ fire sale in NYC.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @05:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @05:26PM (#172881)

    > What is it about all this exhibitionism and brevity?
    > Is it not time that we returned to long handwritten letters to correspondents, in private?

    It isn't like twitter is going out and deleting long-form private letters.

    99% of what people have to say to each other does not require brevity nor privacy. Even if you aren't personally, humans in general are, a chatty, social species. Twitter's ubiquity is ipso facto proof of their value. Monetizing it without destroying that value may prove impossible, but that wouldn't mean the service isn't valuable.