The Reasons for Twitter's Success

The Main Aspects of the Enormous Growth of Microblogging and Tweets

Apr 13, 2009

The number of Twitter users is growing tremendously every month. The key aspects of its service are speed, ease of use, social networking and versatility.

Twitter is a new microblogging and social networking service which was founded in March 2006 by a small group of software engineers in San Francisco, CA. After an initial testing period in which the system's concept showed itself immensely popular among the closed community, its founders decided to open the service up, and in May 2007, Twitter Incorporated was founded.

Twitter's Enormous Growth

Since then, Twitter's success has been enormous. In February 2009, the social network has had a total of over 10 million unique visitors, an increase of 700% to last year!

The increase in American unique visitors even reached 1000% to 4 million in that same month. Today, after the short 3 years of its life, Twitter is the third most popular site among social networks, right after Facebook and MySpace .

Aspects of Twitter's Success Strategy

Twitter's success is very uncommon, even for social network start-ups, one example for this is the tremendous growth which can't even be equalled by Facebook, a site which many predicted to be the social network of the future. Reasons for this explosion in popularity are:

Simplicity, Social Networking and Speed

The simplicity of its interface and the tweeting process -the action of sending an update or message to the site- is one of the most important points if a service wants to win regular users. All a new user has to do is go to the Twitter homepage, register and start entering his first update. All following updates will then show up on this page as an infinite flow of his personal thoughts, almost like a diary.

Social networks have recently proven themselves enormously popular, and Twitter is no exception to this rule: One of its key aspects is the possibility to use it to keep in touch with friends, see what they're up to and let them know what you are thinking, or letting them comment on your messages.

The difference to sites like Facebook however is that with Twitter, users can see the messages of millions of people who aren't acquainted with each other, and if they find their tweets (=messages) interesting, they can follow them in order to read their future updates. This way, users can use Twitter not only to connect to friends, but also to make new ones based on their interests.

The speed is another point which clearly differentiates Twitter from other sites like MySpace: While MySpace shows its users an entire, colorful and personalized profile of each person where they have to scroll through many messages to find something relevant, Twitter omits the complexity. There's just one feature: written 140 character messages. This enables users to get a fast update on their friend's lives because they don't have to read entire paragraphs or blog posts. In addition to this, every user's own update is just a text message without the need of adding fancy photographs or other unimportant and time-consuming gimmicks.

Professional Use and App Diversity

As text messages can contain (mostly shortened) links to whatever website a user wants, he can use Twitter to promote himelf, his writing, his product or his company. Many professional users register with Twitter to get more visits to their company's page or to update people about current activities and developments. Likewise do newspapers use the service for breaking news, and celebrities in order to give their fans a possibility to follow them ever more closely, often without consulting their publicists, which adds even more value to their posts.

Finally, Twitter may be one of many different microblogging services, but it certainly is the one with the most public exposure and thus the most users and the most third-party-applications. Whatever operating system a user may be using, there's a Twitter app for it. Even on the go users are offered many applications like PocketTweets for the Apple iPhone or just plain old SMS-message updating which can be used with any mobile phone.

The Future of the Web and Personal Electronics

It can be said without any exaggeration that Twitter is currently a major player in the Internet game, and as just exposed, many of its popularity is caused by its speed and ease of use. This general concept of fewer but highly developed and fully exploited features seems to be a major success strategy for current and future web and mobile device development, just as can be seen with Apple's formula for success .

The copyright of the article The Reasons for Twitter's Success in Social Networking/Tagging is owned by Jim Schumacher. Permission to republish The Reasons for Twitter's Success in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.