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Twitter is Not Dying

Interesting points to ponder:

• People who say Twitter has a growth problem are making a mistake by comparing it to Facebook. Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform.” And media platforms should not be judged by the same metrics as social networks.
• Social networks connect people with one another. Those connections tend to be reciprocal. Media platforms, by contrast, connect publishers with their public. Those connections tend not to be reciprocal. One Twitter user may be followed by millions of strangers whom she feels no obligation to follow back, any more than an evening news anchor feels the need to check in with each of her viewers every night at 6.
• As a media platform, Twitter’s chief function is to help people keep up with what’s going on in the world, and what influential people are thinking and doing at any given time.
• Twitter’s most influential users do not tweet with the expectation that they’ll be heard only with the people who follow them directly. Rather, they treat the platform like it’s a one-way TV interview, using Twitter to break news, to win arguments, to build their brands, to hone their public personas.
• The YouTube comparison is more apt than it might seem. Like Twitter, YouTube comprises two broad classes of users: content creators and viewers. The difference is that you can still get the full YouTube experience if you visit the site without an account. And so YouTube is able to report more than 1 billion “unique visitors” per month
• Don’t be surprised to see Twitter become more YouTube-like, turning its home page into a real-time news platform accessible to anyone, whether they’re logged in or not.

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