Twitter explodes into marketing, conferences and everything else
[Cross-posted with the iMedia Connection blogs.]
Between December’s iMedia Agency Summit and this week’s iMedia Brand Summit a curious thing happened: Twitter use among our attendees grew by orders of magnitude.
If you search “iMediaAgency” at search.twitter.com you’ll see around four and a half pages of tweets from December. For this week’s Summit, we switched simply to “iMedia,” and if you search results you’ll see around 31 pages of results.
That’s nearly a 700% increase!
There’s a lesson here for marketers, agencies and media people of all sorts: Twitter is the fastest-growing online media channel and you ignore it at your peril. My friend Mark Silva sent up an early flare about this in “What Twitter Means for Marketers” back in May of 2007, and in the intervening time Twitter has moved from a glimmer in the eyes of early adopters to a genuine force.
Don’t just take my word for it: a conveniently-timed data memo from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that came out this week tells us that Twitter use among online Americans shot from 6% in May of 2008 to 9%in November of 2008 and then another two percentage points to 11% in December of 2008– that’s before the growth I noticed among iMedia Summit attendees this week.
40% of online Americans will use Twitter by year’s end
Granting that iMedia folks over-index for new digital channels, if you extend forward the nearly 200% increase of Twitter use among ordinary online Americans between May and December of last year then by the end of this year we can reasonably expect 40% of online Americans to be using Twitter in some way. Since Pew sees Twitter use most extensively among both social media users (23% of social media users also use Twitter, compared to 4% of non-social media users who tweet) and wireless data users (76% of Twitterers use the internet wirelessly), we can predict that as social media and wireless data access grow so will microblogging.
Before you dismiss Twitter as the latest social media fad amongst youngsters who don’t buy anything, according to the Pew memo “Twitter use is not dominated by the youngest of young adults. Indeed, the median age of a Twitter user is 31.”
Ordinarily, I’m ambivalent about Twitter: I relish the connectedness but worry about the shiny-object distraction. I like the fact that a tweet can give somebody 15 pico-seconds of fame, but wince at the fact that often it’s only for those 15 pico-seconds. (Example: when I wrote about my Twitter-fears here a year ago, Steve Rubel tweeted about the post and my blog traffic skyrocketed… for about a month.)
But I can no longer ignore Twitter, and neither can anybody reading this post.
Learn about Twitter at iMedia’s Breakthrough Summit
If you don’t know how to wrap your head around how Twitter is going to force marketing and advertising to change (just search your brand on search.twitter.com to get a glimpse of where this is going), then don’t worry! Help is on the way. I’ve invited Rodney Rumford, author of the book “Twitter as a Business Tool” to speak at next month’s Breakthrough Summit. Rodney will also co-teach a Master Class on Twitter with Christi Day of Southwest Airlines.
And you can follow me on Twitter by clicking here: http://www.twitter.com/bradberens
I’ll try to tweet interesting things.
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