The Spyder Trap Online Marketing Blog

Good Twitter. Bad Twitter? – Pros and Cons of Twitter.

Posted June 19th, 2008 by Mike Rynchek

Mike Rynchek
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

Guest Blogger: Erica Butler of GrowthFire

 

Let’s open this series by simply laying out some of the major benefits and issues around Twitter.

 

Good Twitter?

Twitter has an incredibly devoted group of people in the online space. Why? Is it because people simply love finding new ways to connect to one another? Perhaps. It also could be because Twitter is just so simple to use. Create an account and instantly connect with others. How great of an idea is that? As an online marketing and social media fanatic, this provides one more medium that allows me to communicate with groups of people in new and creative means and even acts as a means to solve client objectives. You need an additional medium to connect with client/customers/users? Why not a free service like Twitter? You need a simple way to provide technical support for your product or service but have limited time and funding to develop the technology internally? Why not using Twitters existing technology and user base? The point is this… Twitter can be used for a number of applications other than just posting messages stating, “I’m eating a sandwich” or “the dog is barking”. You just need to be creative.

 

Bad Twitter?

We have all likely seen the really neat “Twitter is currently down for temporary maintenance” page. Actually I am looking at it as I am writing this post. How fitting? What with the cute little birds carrying the whale… how calming? In reality, this is a major issue. Unfortunately Twitter did not plan to average 2,000 plus new accounts, 1 million + users, 200,000 active users per week and 3 million messages a day all by March of 2008. (Stats by Techcrunch.com) Too often Twitter is either slow, has limited functionality or even worse has crashed completely? This planning error has absolutely killed the user experience and has turned many Twitter brand evangelists into brand demons.

 

John Freund CEO of Nabbit.com put it best when he stated… “We put a great deal of time and effort into building fans of the Nabbit brand and technology and we want to ensure their user experience is as optimal as possible every time they use Nabbit.”

 

Graphs provided by http://www.kottke.org/07/05/twitter-vs-blogger-redux

These graphs cover the following time periods: 8/23/1999 - 3/7/2002 for Blogger and 3/21/2006 - 5/7/2007 for Twitter.

 

 

Why don’t we conclude by laying out some of those pros and cons and you can decide for yourself? Good Twitter. Bad Twitter? Did I miss any?

 

Pro. Ability to reach a mass group of people.

Con. Market becomes a very crowded space, very quickly.

 

Pro. Ability to send out a message and drive traffic.

Con. Clearly a few bugs and technical issues.

 

Pro. New way to engage with people. Kinda?

Con. Often times, people don’t respond due to clutter.

 

Pro. Another Social Media tool.

Con. Another Social Media tool that you need to constantly update.

 

Pro. Can be creative with the technology. (Ex. Use it for customer service.)

Con. Only so much you can do with the technology. (Not a ton you can do with Twitter.)

 

Good Twitter. Bad Twitter - You be the judge!

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Tags: Nabbit, Social Media, Tech Crunch, Twitter