Unsocial Twitter hits the big time
Jinfo Blog

30th May 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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For a social networking site, Twitter isn’t very social, a research team has concluded. Perhaps not, but its power and influence are increasing all the time – so how can information professionals make best use of it? Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology found that only 22% of all connections on Twitter were reciprocal. Most people were using it to follow breaking news channels rather than interactively, making it more like a broadcast medium than a social network (link to the research at http://digbig.com/5bbrcf or try http://digbig.com/5bbrch for a handy résumé in non-academic language). Their findings may have been given greater weight by the recent news that LinkedIn has further upgraded its Tweets application to allow its members to keep track of their connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter (reported by Penny Crossland at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29156). If, as it appears, Twitter isn’t turning out to be a true social medium, it makes sense to get into bed with one that is. It’s little more than six months since Nancy Davis Kho reported that Twitter and Linkedin first ‘felt the love’ (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26788), subsequently commenting that Twitter was expected to end 2009 in the black and was starting to call the shots with previously more powerful partners. ‘Twitter is the place where Microsoft and Google need to be if they are to maintain their own relevance’, she said (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27542). Since then Twitter has been pressing home its advantage by doing even more deals with partners enormous and tiny (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28066). Now, following its first tentative trials with sponsored Tweets (see Nancy’s comments at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28618), it’s poised to really flex its muscles – and earn some serious money – with advertisers. Currently adding another dozen or so advertisers to the Promoted Tweets programme that it initially unveiled with five participants, Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo has told Reuters that he expects ‘hundreds of advertisers’ by the fourth quarter. And he’s launching a commercial accounts business later in the summer (http://digbig.com/5bbrck). The company is also starting to get tough with freeloaders; apart from Promoted Tweets, it is going to ban any third party from injecting paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. Third party ad networks don’t necessarily preserve the unique Twitter user experience, Costolo says – but instead ‘may seek to maximise ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction’ (http://digbig.com/5bbrcm). Twitter may not be very social, but that doesn’t diminish its potential importance for business – or its efforts to woo the corporate sector (http://digbig.com/5bbrcn). Perhaps it’s time for information managers to start deciding who they can’t afford not to follow.

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