Many articles can be found on social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter. Steve Thornton provides a great description and systematic comparison of both of their pros and cons. Last week Jernej wrote an interesting post on this topic, where he argued that Twitter and Facebook differ significantly considering their target audiences. He states that:
"Facebook is more about connecting with friends you know, Twitter is connecting with people you might want to know - exchanging information." While (in my opinion) most of (us) Twitter and Facebook users agree with this assessments, especially Twitter being about knowledge, an interesting article on Twitter confirms this providing statistical data. As Paul Judge, author of the report, put it:
"As of December 2009, only 21% of Twitter account holders were defined as "true users," meaning someone who has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and has tweeted at least 10 times. /.../ [This means that most Twitter users] came online to follow their favorite celebrities, not to interact with their buddies the way they would on Facebook or MySpace." I can agree on that, but I think that these statistics need some further explanations. What I observed, is that a lot of technophils mostly prefer Twitter to Facebook and probably represent a large segment of those 21% of “true users”, although they are not using it primarily to follow their favorite celebrities. They usually emphasize abilities such as rapid responsiveness, interactivity, extensible messaging platforms and less “cluster” made by applications and the like. So they could count as social users.
And another observation: A lot of people sign up for Twitter, because they heard a lot about it from their friends or read about it, find it to confusing, don't want to deal with figuring out how it works and never come back again. Their first post is most likely to sound something like: "This thing is so confusing" or "I can't figure this thing out, how does it work?" etc. So I am not surprised, that nearly 80% of Twitter accounts don't count as true/really active users, because they are not really users.
What do you think?
I really do not like Twitter because I am very turned off by the whole idea. I look at it as a tool for promotion because actually is working on the basis of promoting celebrities (well I think that it become so popular just because of celebrities although it will be interesting to research about Twitter's beginnings). I also think that because of it's interactivity and rapid responsiveness (like you're mention) Twitter is popular in the sphere of sharing information. But the question I am raising is if this information are really so important to us, why we must twitt them to people we do not know? I would understand if people would share information to actual known people, but alongside with this I think Twitter's main role is promotion and new channel for companies, celebrities and other for making and maintaining contact (or should I say promoting to) with consumers. Although Twitter has some democratic potential I do not believe that this can be so utilized because (like me) users (who actually do not use Twitter) are turned off by commercial use of it.
OdgovoriIzbrišiFirstly, I don't perceive Twitter as interactive as Facebook can be and therefore I don't see it becoming as widely spread and used.
OdgovoriIzbrišiSecondly, I don't think measuring real users with parameters 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and has tweeted at least 10 times are appropriate. Tina, how were they selected?
I agree with Tanja, Twitter at first glimpse looks like a tool for promotion. Does anyone know how efficient is it?
@Tanja: I see your concerns about the (ab)use for promotional purposes and I agree, that most companies find it as a convenient tool/channel for marketing, advertising and even some PR. Celebrities played an important part in Twitter's early days, and this is still the case today as Judge noted.
OdgovoriIzbrišiAs for your question regarding information sharing – the way I see it, the purpose of information and knowledge sharing is not entertainment of “a certain target audience.” Since Twitter is different from the social networking sites such as Facebook, you don't make “friends” but “subscribers”, which means that unless I made my Twitter profile private, anyone can see it, and if they find the published content of their interest, they can subscribe (unless I block them) and additionally reply to me or retweet my post. I follow some people I don't really know, but I find their posts interesting, fun, amusing etc. so it makes sense to me. It works kind of like virtually communities: its a social network of individuals who interact using Twitter and are potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests publishing in 140 characters or less.
@Tina: I am not sure about the methodology, I too question it, since the article does not provide much information on that. Of course it's hard to put limits on the criteria - what number of tweets, subscribers and subscriptions effectively capture the “real users”? Personally, I would primarily reconsider the definition of “active” - does that mean that user publishes at least x number of tweets per day or can “active” also designate those, that log in on a daily basis and merely look at what others posted?
OdgovoriIzbrišiI am not yet familiar with any reports on it's efficiency, although I am curious.
Avtor je odstranil ta komentar.
OdgovoriIzbrišiThe methodological approach is crap! It tells us nothing of the nature of usage, social networks being formed, the dynamics of interaction, content and the whole point of experiencing Twitter. Any judgements made on account of randomly sampled tweets will also result in failing to understand the point.
OdgovoriIzbrišiI think (based on my own experiences and research on usage so far) Twitter is about hanging around the web and sharing your thoughts and ideas with people. I agree with Tina H. on the "technophiles" observation. People who I see posting the most are people who adore new technologies and usually want to share their fascination with new trends and products with their new Twitter buddies: "in order to pursue mutual interests publishing in 140 characters or less."
Under a Twitter stream on a random web page it says: join the conversation. T users talk about twittering as joining the flow of the sea of ideas. It is about contributing your drop of thought on a subject matter. On the other hand it is about "eavesdropping" on random conversations and maybe responding.
T users compare it to a virtual "water-cooler", where they chat and exchange thoughts. It makes them feel less lonely, when they are at home or at their workplace. They also compare it to a virtual "coffe-shop", where you tune in to various ongoing conversations to amuse yourself.
It is confusing at first, but you soon start to filter tweets as you go along. There are also a lot of apps that help you organize and filter them. Trying to read everything all the time would be pointless, not to mention time-consuming.
For me it is about checking for what is going on. But I do believe there is something about CNN`s assesment: Twitter itself changed their policy in 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?". Go to Twitter page and you can read "Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world."
Twitter is constantly evolving and it is really hard to pin-down what is trully going on. But its usage is growing and we will just have to see where this leadds us in the future.
@ Tina P.: The true potentials of Twitter and social media in general have first been recognized by marketing experts. Most new social media have barely touched widespred adoption when they have already been seen as a marketing opportunity. So much that companies started training their employees in social media marketing and hiring social media experts to develop a strategy of brand awareness. We even have a social media academy, dammit!
Twitter has actually been heavily influenced by these facts. Its interface has been more and more developed to help companies monitor the buzz about their brands, to find opinion leaders or social clusters oof potential consumers. I˙m not sure yet, but I suspect it was the marketing drive which helped shape the usage of Twitter (as a side effect) and I have a feeling it is what shaped usage of other social media as well. We should definitely check on that.
I must admit that I really don't like Twitter and I never tried to join the ''tweeting community''. I agree with Tina who said it isn't as social as Facebook (for example) is. But I do think that it is mostly conditioned with what the person's interests are, what they do and what they are engaged wih. In my example, I just wouldn't know that to ''tweet'' about! It just doesn't seem the same as with Facebook where you can write almost about anything and all of your friend will see it, just because they are you're friends. This is probably conditioned with the fact that on Facebook a person has ''friends'', and on Twitter a person has ''subscribers''. I see more responsibility from on writers side in the latter relationship, a more vertical one. But despite all said, I don't think Twitter is an unuseful tool, not at all. It quite suits some people, who have something to say. It just doesn't suit me.
OdgovoriIzbriši