Back in summer 2008 Twitter was very different place. Sure it was starting to grow massively both here and in the US, but it was still largely dominated by techy folk who were using micro blogging to gently make fun of each other, share injokes and swap cupcake recipes.
Then came the celebs, the BBC and ultimately a media frenzy and Twitter went mainstream.
However there are whispers now and then that Twitter has lost something over the last year. And it isn’t anything to do with the number of people using the site, the celebs, the BBC or even the spammers. No it is the way that so many people are now using the site to share links or even push their own content.
On one level people have always shared links on Twitter, but it does seem now that the links are starting to seriously compete with the number of posts which detail people’s lives. I looked half an hour a go and of the 20 tweets in my feed 13 were from people either plugging their own content or pointing me in the direction of something interesting.
There are two reasons why I think blog linking and promotion of content has shot through the roof.
1 Every blog now has an RSS feed on Twitter and its owners also encourage its readers to tweet about its content. Twitter has made it very easy blog owners to get a hot story to many people quickly. In some ways it has superseded story aggregators like Digg and Yahoo Buzz..
2 The services that have grown up around micro blogging are getting more popular. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that believes that 140 charactars really are all the charactars you need. I am also a blogger who loves images and video. So blog services like Posterous and Typepad, which enable bloggers to make quick posts which then automatically show up on Twitter (and Facebook feeds) are something I am really passionate about. It is interesting to note that there hasn’t really been much of discernible backlash about the amount of linking.
It seems to be something that the majority of Twitter users are ok with the growing number of links – for now anyhow.
So what does this mean for brands? Well a year ago when companies like British Airways, Starbucks and Dell were on Twitter they were clearly a novelty and attracted a great deal of followers without too much effort. It is still fairly easy for brands to build up followers on Twitter as the number of Twitter users has rocketed. However as time goes by brands may have to come up with more imaginative uses of the micro blogging format to ensure that their tweets get noticed.
