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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:47PM
Historians of Roman rhetoric sometimes talk about a change from a society based on oratory to one based on acclamation. In the Republic, speech acts are characterized by depth, length, and eloquence, as orators had to compose persuasive arguments to win over the people or the Senate. As the Empire wore on, persuasion became less relevant as decision-making became more centralized (the "Empire" under Augustus was actually pretty close to the old Republic in form, while after Constantine it was much more a monarchy), and the speech acts reported in later Roman history, such as the SHA, tend to be short advertising jingles ("acclamations") that one person pronounces and others repeat in unison. Thus the brevity of speech is taken as an index of the relevance of speech to decision making -- when the speaker can influence social decisions, he speaks at length, but when he cannot, he briefly repeats slogans and jingles.
Twitter is the electronic form of Roman acclamation. Or, in other words, Twitter is irrelevant to influencing major decisions, but it's great for retweeting slogans.