This evening San Francisco time Social Media heavy weights and media gathered in the cafeteria at Twitter HQ for a special announcement. Images and Video are coming to the Twitter timeline. This move while condemned by some as the Facebookification of Twitter follows a number of recent changes that Twitter have made to boost signups, retention and participation.
Good For New and Casual Twitter Users
Making Twitter a more visual experience has already improved competition of signups. No doubt it will make the Twitter experience more engaging for new and more casual users. Twitter veterans noticed a low level of participation after the massive growth of early to mid 2009, (Oprah starts tweeting and Ashton Kutcher beats CNN to 1 000, 000 followers) during which time many people signed up, played for a while, and dropped away. The Twitter web interface is very text based and no doubt understanding and engaging with it may seem a little dry to beginners.
Video and Images Will Lead To Greater Participation
However with 1 in 4 tweets containing a link and many of those links being video or images the new interface is likely to seem far more exciting to anyone who is trying to understand what it’s all about. This will really make lists more engaging and will make the feed only accounts i.e. twitter accounts which publish feeds without being conversation, much more relevant
Motivated By Growing Twitter Revenue
With Twitter still searching for a killer revenue model this latest initiative makes the web interface more relevant which will no doubt assist current revenue streams such as promoted tweets.
What are your thoughts?
What are your thoughts? Will you be likely to use Twitter more? How would you compare and contrast the new Twitter with Facebook?
If you are looking to create more income, more impact in your market or more traffic to your website. To take things up a notch. Then perhaps the first question needs to be what value are you going to create and how can you clearly communicate that value to the people who care?
That's a deeper and a harder question to ask clients, and to ask yourself.
If you are feeling frustrated about your efforts to create more income, traffic or influence. Creating more of what you have been creating or spreading it further is unlikely to be the answer.
Remember 1995. Remember hearing people talk about the Information Super Highway. There was a notion that if you could just get a website, if you were "online". You would be magically connected to this global economy and people from all over the world would start buying your products and services. It was hard work then and while it's so much easier now the fundamentals don't change.
What people give their time to. What people feel compelled to share with friends. Is something they value.
If you want more impact/income/traffic, DON'T do more of what you are doing.
It's like jumping on the earth twice as much expecting to move the planet. Instead like Archimedies look for a lever.
