We touched upon the idea of Twitter going mainstream and hitting critical mass a few weeks ago. However, we didn’t quite think things would gather pace as quickly as they have. While Stephen Fry has been doing his best to become the Guru of all things Technology in this country, the good ol’ Current Bun has been doing its best to turn Twitter on to the tits’n'tabs brigade in a piece about the whole idea of Social Media. They did this by carrying out a 24 hour blitz on Facebook and Twitter. While they decided it was addictive the overall tone was one of ‘leave it alone!’
However, when you really need to hit the big numbers, especially in the States, there is only one production in town – Harpo Productions.
That’s right, Twitter has been given the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval and as a result, it is estimated that over 1.2 million people signed up as a direct result to see what the fuss was about. While this is great news for Twitters profile, is this really the way to build a loyal user base?
It’s not only Oprah that seems to want to claim Twitter for the mainstream. At the same time that everyone’s mainstream barometer of taste is getting to grips with the technology, the ‘kids’ favourite Ashton Kutcher has been doing a similar stint of PR magic. He used his considerable talents as the man who brought us ‘Punk’d’ and for being with Demi Moore, to race CNN to be the first name to have One Million followers. He won but did it actually do the profile of Twitter any good?
So, are we about to start surfing the crest of the wave or are there already problems in store? It seems we may be in for choppy water, as over at VNU.net it seems Twitters biggest problem isn’t going to be the likes Richard Madeley and wife and other Oprah-lite TV shows pushing out there new ’summer read’ to all and sundry but Twitter actually having an audience to use the service long term.
According to the report, retention of users is proving a problem. Twitter seems to be retaining around 40 per cent of users at the moment, which is better than the 30 per cent it had been holding on to for the previous 12 months or so but it’s hardly going to create big waves of excitement. It seems that people like the idea of Twitter for a couple of weeks but getting them to use it for more than a month is more of a struggle.
It looks like Twitter has become a victim of its own success. If it is to grow it needs to work out ways of retaining users while at the same time delivering services the mainstream see as useful, otherwise I think we all just got Punk’d.