The spike in mid-March occurred when Twitter blew up at SXSW.
But look at the site's traffic over the last 3 months:
Appears that traffic to the site is leveling off. I think by now, most people that are going to pick up on the site have started using it. I'm seeing almost no Twitter talk on the blogs I frequent, after being inundated with talk about the service a couple of months ago.
I think it will be interesting to see what this graph looks like in a couple of months. Personally, I just never have gotten into Twitter, but I know that many enjoy the service. I think the problem for marketers is finding a way to filter all the messages left via Twitter, based on relevance. I haven't used Twitter much, but I haven't read about any way to search the messages left via Twitter. If Twitter adds this functionality, or if someone creates a widget that does this, that could boost usage significantly.
As I said, I think the next few months will tell the tale for Twitter.
UPDATE: Scoble takes credit for Twitter's growth.
5 comments:
"I think by now, most people that are going to pick up on the site have started using it."
Too soon to be making that call. While I'm not advocate nor anti-Twitter, I think it's important to look at all adoption rates of all technologies (they all climb and fall..sometimes they even out, other times they fizzle out).
The 'net climbed like crazy and then the bubble burst and yet users came on like droves after that. I guess my points is that it's not yet time to make a call on broadcast SMS technology (or its main brand, Twitter) is all.
Have you seen Rohit's great post on the marketing uses thereof:
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/a_few_nonboring.html
P.S.: I like your idea on search capabilities...you should submit the recc to them ;-).
P.P.S.: You might check out Twit's cousin Jaiku, too. Some interesting 'streaming' functionalities.
Not sure if your blog platform will take that above link.
If you look at the traffic chart, Twitter surged for about a 7-10 day period in March. This almost perfectly correlates with Twitter's sponsorship at SXSW. Since then, traffic has more or less flatlined. That suggests that the traffic surge was driven by hype, not the service itself.
Now if Twitter adds some functionality that betters the service, that could boost traffic again. But if the service stays in its current form, I wouldn't be shocked to see traffic start to fall in the coming months. My guess is that eventually traffic will fall down to a level that's a bit above it's pre-SXSW levels.
I really am enjoying Jaiku since I've built a plugin that posts my latest on my blog sidebar.
Perhaps some of Twitter's issues are that competition is creeping in.
Mack,
You know, I just never got (and still don't) Twitter. I could never answer the question why?
The best explanation I heard of what Twitter is "passing notes" like in class. I've notice that females are using Twitter extensively in my friends network.
Other than that, I see it as a huge time drain.
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