Twitter’s current strategy seems to be to woo celebrities to the network and in turn that will drag the mainstream along with it. The problem with this is that whilst reality tv is very popular reading the text of celebrities is not always that interesting. Hello magazine etc do a good job of just showing the interesting bits and can monitor Twitter for them. How many times will the mainstream come back to see if anything interesting has happened. Not enough if the numbers leaving Twitter are anything to go by.
There is one thing that will attract people back – I gave it away in the title – events. I do not mean just the business conferences that have been popular on Twitter with the tech and marketing crowd. I mean the concerts and clubs. There’s enough focus and length of time that people will stay interested in monitoring it via their phones and they’re likely to meet people who are into the same things as they are building up a followerbase.
The end result is that a person reaches a critical mass of followers quicker and even if that fails to happen after one event they are likely to come back for the second.. and third etc etc.
Of course Facebook is still in a strong position due to its size if it can move quickly enough.
A possible problem for Facebook that everyone in the tech world complains about is the lack of asymmetric friendships. On Facebook, you can only see someone’s newsfeed if they friend you back. On Twitter you can choose to follow someone and not have them follow you back. However, the privacy in Facebook is a strong feature for them over time – there are some stuff you just do not want the whole world to see. Facebook’s fan pages may well do the job and allow you to see all the other fans and the celebs and then listen/interact with them.
However, whilst there is greater usage of Facebook’s mobile apps than Twitter right now, the Twitter apps are more obviously able to handle event specific message streams than Facebook using its search functionality. Facebook would need to change its mobile apps at least to accomodate easy access to fan pages.
Finally, neither Twitter nor Facebook have realtime updates on mobiles which would be a boon for this type of usage. But one step at a time 😉
(Image courtesy: Osei)
