Most marketers have been keeping a close eye on Twitter but not too many have jumped in with both feet. Partly because it’s still an unknown and partly because even if you wanted to it’s difficult to spend money on Twitter programs.
Well, now there is another reason to watch and wait, Nielsen is showing a huge decline in unique Twitter visitors this past month.
To be fair, 18.9 million is still a huge number of unique visitors and because of different methodologies other sources aren’t showing such a huge decline, but everyone is showing a decline. And, these reports don’t reflect the number of people who access Twitter thru third- party apps, mobile phones, for example.
So now we watch some more. Is this month an anomaly? Or, has the cool factor worn itself out and tweeting about random thoughts is getting to be more of a pain than it’s worth?
Twitter’s problem is that it a glorified RSS service. When I say that, I mean readers will quickly learn (after signing up) that there’s not much to the service except getting new stories in bits — just like the old RSS feeds from years ago.
My point is this, Twitter is this year’s Second Life. By this time next year, Twitter will have become even less relevant. There’s no way to monetize the service and growth potential is bottlenecked by it’s extremely limited scope of design.
And, with the economy being so bad right now, I can’t imagine many companies want to invest a lot into unknow, unproven advertising directions. Besides, from the companies I’ve seen who are interested in Twitter, they just have a person on staff setup an account and post updates internally. There’s no real way to make Twitter a valuable asset to “sell” to clients since it’s so painfully simple and limited ANY employee at ANY company can figure it out.