The Future of the Twitter

Have you ever seen a page with a whale carried by a lot of small birds? If you tweet regularly, I bet, you have. What it says, is that the Twitter got over capacity and cannot handle your request at the moment. What does it mean to you and how will it affect you in the future as an Internet marketer? After all, Twitter is a great source of free targeted traffic (did you see my review of Bill Crossby’s Twitter Traffic Machine?)

That overload is quite understandable. While Twitter was around for several years, it experienced an explosive growth in the last couple of years. Some claim it’s because of black hat marketers who use robots to register hundreds of Twitter accounts and massively spam the media. However, if you think about it, that would not work if that was the only reason. Robots may spam, but they don’t read and they don’t order. Spam instantly decreases efficiency of any marketing media to the point where it’s nearly useless. And, to start from, you need already viable marketing media for spam to start in the first place.

With the time, Twitter will get more mature and develop tools to keep spammers off. That’s the same evolution we had with other media: email, forums, search engines, even PPC, you name it. In fact, they just did a massive cleanup on Twitter literally a week or two ago. So, while robots and spammers are part of the problem, they are not the reason for Twitter overgrowth problems.

Why people use the Twitter?

The key is that Twitter organic growth itself is viral (that’s why I write about it here, on ViralMarketingEtc.com). Many people tried Twitter originally, when it just appeared, and dropped from it. I did. After all, think about it. What value to you or to your followers may have a message like “I am sitting in the restroom and twitting this stupid message on my cell phone”? That’s kind of messages you could see on the Twitter originally. The key is there is no real value and that’s the whole point! After all, if you follow one or two thousand people, what’s your chance of seeing their tweets? No much, right? And still a lot of people follow thousands people. What does it tell us?

Reading other people tweets is not why most people use the Twitter.

So, why do they use it? Here comes the viral nature. To be viral any idea or pattern of behavior must have two components:

An anchor: why would you do that?
A carrier: why would you pass that to others?

In the strongest viral systems (think totalitarian sects and MLM marketing) the carrier works toward the anchor. And that’s exactly what the Twitter does as long as you get what the Twitter anchor is.

But first, let’s talk about the anchors. There is a very small set of basic anchors that works well. You may invent and sometimes even create new anchors, but that’s a lot of work and it does not work that well. The Big List of “oldies but goldies” include sex, survival, wealth, wellness, social status and social proof of yourself, belonging to a community, and a few more. Did you already noticed, which one the Twitter is using to recruit its users?

You are right, social status and social proof of yourself. “Followers” on Twitter is supposedly people, who read your tweets. We already established that this is not the case, most people have no physical capacity to read the tweets of everybody, they follow. But what matters, is that they are supposed to be reading those. Hence, the number of followers tells how interesting you are, how many people want to read what you have to say to the world. And, let’s admit it, most people don’t have much interesting stuff to tell to the world, so that feeling of importance is not that easy to achieve. Unless you are on the Twitter, of course.

As a result, Twitter ethics evolved to include such rules as “follow those who follow you.” Some people ignore it, and in most cases it means that nobody follows them. A few stars from outside of Twitter world can ignore that rule and still be massively followed, but few stars would never create a mass audience, so who cares? These are the exceptions that only reinforce the rule.

Organic nature of the Twitter problems

Now, consider how it works along with the Twitter technical capacities. Most users come to the Twitter to have social proof of themselves. That social proof is measured by the number of followers. Number of followers in a general case depends on the number of users you follow. Once you follow tons of users, you cannot really read their tweets and, either on one end or another, it becomes an increasingly computationally complex task to Tweeter to deliver all the updates to followers. Hence, the Twitter overloads and pictures of flying whales.

The Twitter will get rid of spam bots, or at least will develop some good detergents from spamming. That’s what it needs to do to survive. In fact, they should have included mail confirmation of new twitter accounts long ago. That’s a good thing not only for most users, but also for you as an Internet marketer, because it will significantly increase the responsiveness of the Twitter as the marketing media. Remember? Bots don’t read your tweets and don’t order. However, this is not the reason why the Twitter gets overload problems!

The twitter overloads are the organic result of the very reason why people are using it in the first place!

What the Twitter does so far

So far the Twitter response was to limit number of people you can follow. Bascially, you cann't add tons of followers overnight, if you just created the account; you are limited by 2000 people to follow until you get about 1850 people, who follow you; and after that you are limited to about 10% above the number of your followers.

What does it do? First, it cools down the things a bit, and that’s good. Also, it prevents spambot from becoming instant superstars of Twitter and that’s also good. BUT! It also works against the very reason people come to the Twitter.

I literally saw such a message on the Twitter:

Stupid fake celebrities! They follow you to make you follow them, and then they drop you dead, and you are stuck with 2000 followers!

Really. Social proof and status is always a competition. What’s the use to have 2000 followers, if everybody has 2000 followers? It’s nothing, it’s just a baseline, right?

You see? What the Twitter does is shooting itself in a foot by restricting and devaluing the very same reason people come to it!

What to expect?

And now we come to the most interesting question of all: what can we expect in the future and what does it mean to us? It depends on which scenario will take place.

Scenario #1: Twitter will continue restricting users in the number of followers.

For Internet marketers, it’s likely will mean that instead of one Twitter account with a lot of followers, you’ll need to have a number of Twitter accounts with a reasonable number of followers each. Granted, it pushes a lot of marketers into the “gray hat” area to say the least, but 2000 followers is not that great source of traffic, if that’s what you are using the Twitter for. And any reasonable conversation will require you to move those useful followers (potential JVs, etc.) to some other media like Facebook, LinkedIn or something else.

It will also open an interesting business opportunity to those willing to create a service allowing to monitor across several Twitter accounts and help building minimally intersecting followership there. It probably will be developed as a monthly subscription service on a web site, and considering “gray hat” nature of the clientele, should primarily be based on some other, more legitimately looking services, like tracking difference between followers and following.

This scenario will also increase the importance of the viral elements of the Twitter as a marketing media. When you tweet directly to your followers, you are not using it. You are basically just broadcasting it to the fixed audience. However, if any of them retweet, your message becomes viral – it’s passed from your follower to their followers and hopefully further down the line. When the number of your followers is limited, viral component becomes much more important. It means that you will want not just followers, but followers who retweet a lot.

That also creates a business opportunity for a service, probably again website and subscription based, that will monitor your followers for retweets and help you to thank and hone those who do and drop those who don’t. It may also provide automatic courtesy retweets for your best followers.

Scenario #2. The Twitter continues on restriction road too far

While restricting number of follower has some positive value to the Twitter, following that road too far may end up with some other microblogging platform taking over, and the Twitter becoming the thing of the past. It is well known that loyalty on Internet is nearly zero. People follow the last fad and fashion massively dropping the previous one. AltaVista, Netscape and LiveSpaces are just few examples.

If that scenario will take place, you, as an Internet marketer, will have to learn the new media and how to use it. The Twitter may just lose its usefulness as a marketing media.

I hope that won’t happen, but the possibility clearly exists. Of course, it won’t happen if the Twitter will find a solution to its current conundrum of its growth based on exactly the thing that makes it impossible to maintain technically. And that’s possible with the scenario #3.

Scenario #3. The Twitter changing the anchor

We already found out that the very anchor that brings people to the Twitter – the number of followers – is what makes it unsustainable in the long term. If it will make it too hard, other social networks will catch up with it and kill it. What’s better, to have 2000 followers on the Twitter or to have 2000 friends on the Facebook? And where people will go, if the effort will be comparable? Not to the Twitter, right?

If the Twitter will set any hard enough limits, number of followers will become useless and the anchor will disappear. What’s the use to have 2000 followers, if everybody has 2000 followers? So, that's not a solution either.

But if none of these things will happen, followership will grow exponentially killing the Twitter servers, no matter how much computational power they will put in.

The answer is to replace the anchor with something technically possible to maintain. The good thing, the Twitter does not have to replace the anchor itself, it only have to replace the manifestation of the anchor. People already come to Twitter for the social status and social proof of themselves. You cannot change that without tons of people dropping from the service. But you can change the social system of the network to replace that manifestation with some other number, which does not require exponential growth of computational power and, hopefully, is more sensible than the number of robots following the user.

You may wonder what could it be? Most attentive reader should have guessed by now. Here is you last chance.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Right. The number of times your tweets were retweeted! It not only shows that a number of people supposedly read your tweets, it means they actually follow you and pass your message along!

To ignite this new metrics, the Twitter will have to add two new counters to the user front page: how many times he retweeted others and how many times he was retweeted by others. First number will tell potential followers whether to follow you or not. The second number is it: your social status on the Twitter.

Counting the number of your own retweets is computationally trivial, no more complex than counting your own tweets in the first place. Counting the number of time you were retweeted is a bit harder, but still much easier that delivering individual tweets to growning number of followers, and this number may be updated on the backend with a delay, so if these backend servers become overloaded, the social status is just updated slower than usual, that’s all. And it’s still much easier computationally than delivering each tweet to thousands of users.

As a side benefit, it will also decrease the load from the services that count retweets. We already found that Internet marketers will need that, and it’s likely that a service will emerge allowing to count retweets by followers. Making these numbers easily available will also reduce the load on the Twitter from such services.

This twist to the Twitter also will significantly improve quality of the tweets and make spambots much harder to use. Currently spambot would just blindly follow as many people as they can, and then drop those who does not reciprocate. Such algorithm is reasonably easy to implement and currently it guarantees eventual growth beyond 10,000 followers.

When retweeting will become important, it is technically possible to write a robot that will occasionally retweet some of the followed users, but the robot cannot evaluate the tweets. Considering that the Twitter network will likely have a “sandwich” nature where robots are layered with real users, you have to retweet high quality tweets only to make them retweeted. Robots cannot do that, at least not yet.

Imagine that User1 sends a tweet: “I am sitting in the rest room”. Robot “User2”, which follows him, retweets: “RT @User1 I am sitting in the restroom.” Guess, how many retweets like “RT @User2 @User1 I am sitting in the rest room.” will he get? Probably none. Maybe an occasional one from another robot.

That will also give the Twitter an interesting metric to take the aim on potential robots: users whose retweets are very rarely retweeted are worth attention.

And in the conclusion…

I don’t know if the Twitter will use that idea or not. Maybe yes, maybe no. But if it will, it will give them ability to continue their growth, still bring value to their customers, and even increase their value to those, who really want to get their message across. In fact, it will significantly increase the viral nature of the Twitter making it a much more valuable PR and marketing media whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Speaking of that, I don’t see why they still did not introduced commercial accounts. Granted, it’s not easy to introduce them ethically, but I guess that’s just a work to be done. Anyway, that’s not what will save the Twitter from its own success. Changing the social status metric will. I hope they do so.

Cross post of my article from http://www.viralmarketingetc.com/2009/07/the-future-of-the-twitter/