Islands in the Stream

Twitter is about the real-​​time web; being in the flow. Once you’re fol­lowing more than 100 people, it becomes an entirely dif­ferent exper­i­ence to instant mes­saging or Facebook. It feels like one of those adverts for the Information Superhighway in the 1990s: people and objects and des­tin­a­tions rush by. Sometimes you’ll stop and check in, by clicking on a mystery link, or catch up on a rela­tion­ship by clicking on a username to see their last dozen updates. In the time you’ve spent doing that, though, a whole new page of updates has magic­ally appeared.

The user exper­i­ence changes rad­ic­ally depending on the client you use:

• The twitter web page doesn’t auto­mat­ic­ally poll its source and change. Yet every time you hit Refresh, it’s dif­ferent. It’s always a reminder that the world keeps turning no-​​matter what’s hap­pening in your own little portion. As much as it lets you see into the world of the people in your network, it’s a reminder of your anonymity. At the same time, the prom­in­ence of the edit box at the top of the page is an invit­a­tion to poke the world; to let people know.
• ‘Pro’ clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl change the pro­pos­i­tion sub­stan­tially. You won’t miss that @ message or the mentions of your brand or interests. For this reason, they’ve become favour­ites among ego­centrics and those with mar­keting or PR interests in the network. In these client applic­a­tions, the edit box has less prom­in­ence. It’s dipping your head into a rushing river, but also checking to see if any of your fishing nets have reeled in a catch; and reset­ting the bait with another update. These clients auto­mat­ic­ally update every few seconds, you see the real time web rush past; but the nets into search terms and messages mean that the feeling of control is not so lost.
• The mobile exper­i­ence is dif­ferent again. You’re less likely to par­ti­cipate in some respects, because data entry on a phone is trickier than from a keyboard. You’re less likely to click a link because you know that your device has a 50% chance of timing-​​out or failing to render the res­ulting page properly. The mobile exper­i­ence is thus likely to be more about obser­va­tion: checking in on your network – the ambient intimacy of it all.

Where am I going with this? A couple of places.

1. Leaving Las Twitteros

First, it turns out that, contrary to the pro­pa­ganda, Twitter is an enormous, blue FAIL WHALE when it comes to reten­tion, Mashable reported yes­terday. Most people leave after a month, it seems:

…growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months.

But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the fol­lowing month. And in the 12 months “pre-​​Oprah”, reten­tion rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month.

There is more than one explan­a­tion for the massive drop-​​off in the last para­graph. The stat­istics given only track web page usage. It’s reas­on­able to suppose that a sub­stan­tial number of users graduate from using the web page to using a dif­ferent client, like Tweetdeck. In the dis­cus­sion of the article, author Pete Cashmore links to another showing that only 30% of updates come via. the page – the rest using other clients.

I don’t think that this explan­a­tion explains the Nielsen figures entirely, though. I know a lot of very artic­u­late and intel­li­gent people to whom Twitter simply does not appeal. They gave it a go and didn’t see the point. That’s OK. Saying that this is because they haven’t given it enough time and effort, as I’ve heard before, is an odd argument. It’s a bit like saying I could come to love self-​​flagellation if I put my back into it, and my nether regions.

The recent celebrity endorse­ments of Twitter which have led to such rapid growth won’t help matters. Listening to the prattle from @stephenfry & co is a less engaging exper­i­ence than being in touch with people you really know and sharing with them, I would suggest. If you use Twitter in order to keep up with certain celebrities, it must be very frus­trating when they’re getting on with their jobs rather than providing updates. I’m not saying there are right and wrong ways to use Twitter – there aren’t – but there are ways that are likely to lead to more engage­ment than others.

The rushing passage of stuff is fine in a 30-​​second com­mer­cial, but hardly everyone’s cup-​​of-​​tea when they actually come to use the Internet. Point One is that Twitter is quite important but is not and will never be the next gen­er­a­tion of the web, etc. etc.

2. Whispers in the Wind

The second matter I wanted to briefly explore was the viab­ility of Twitter as a pub­lishing or atten­tion mech­anism for media owners and insti­tu­tions. Nearly every pub­lisher does this (including NMK and its Lords and Masters at the University of Westminster). Maybe you hand-​​craft your tweets or automate them – it’s easy, using twit­ter­feed from your RSS, but err… it’s not very good, is it?

Your insti­tu­tion or organ­isa­tion will not produce that many updates a day. That’s good in some ways – people will quickly unsub­scribe from feeds that talk too much – espe­cially if they have a cor­porate or robotic feel. At the same time, because you don’t update so often, your reach is tiny compared to almost any other medium. It’s a nudge, a poke, a pebble tossed into the river, a piece of flotsam that people might nudge into from time to time. It’s worth doing only because it’s easy. But because the social media mar­keting experts are using Tweetdeck or some­thing, then they get an illu­sionary exper­i­ence of the impact of their posts – their net full of retweets and @s at the end of the day looks full even for a tiny organ­isa­tion like the one for which I work. At the same time, when I dip my head into the live stream, I see scarcely any inter­ac­tion with tweets from ‘official’ media or insti­tu­tional feeds. And there’s another problem that augments this…

If you open up a new channel of com­mu­nic­a­tion in the social media space, then there needs to be an ear on the other end listening and responding to the feedback. Social media, by defin­i­tion, is not about broad­casting, but is two-​​way. You start a blog, you need a comments person. You send an email; you need a reply-​​address that works. Carefully writing your Blog T&Cs or Twitter bio or Email news­letter sub­script can allow you to redirect responses some­where else, but by entering into a com­mu­nic­a­tions arena that is entirely two-​​way with a one-​​way meth­od­o­logy, you’re asking for problems. (Skittles and The Telegraph’s brave – you may have other words – exper­i­ments with posting unmod­er­ated twitter feeds illus­trate this hand­somely). Point Two is that Twitter is for people, not things.

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