Underground Blog

Interesting statistic on Mashable today that says 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month: http://mashable.com/2009/04/28/twitter-quitters/?disqus_reply=8811414#comment-8811414

I have a feeling this may be due to people coming to Twitter for the wrong reasons. Namely, many are looking for friends, a group of people to associate with and just an overall lots of interaction and applications that make the whole experience fun.

I’ve got just the site for you. It’s called Facebook. Or MySpace if you prefer.

See, we get so wrapped up in trying to find the Perfect Social Networking Tool that sometimes we forget that it can be a better experience overall to use different tools for different things and that’s really quite OK.

Finding friends on Twitter is harder, but I’m not sure that using Twitter for this purpose is really the best anyway. Facebook and MySpace have got Twitter beat in the “personal” realm because not only is it easier to get a group together but the apps that accompany your friends and groups are fun, easy and encourage repeat engagement. You don’t really have that going on on Twitter. I’ve found Twitter’s apps to make the experience better for me, but not for an overall group I continuously belong to.

So if you come to Twitter seeking friends and lots of 2-way communication between each other, I don’t see Twitter as successful in that way. I do see Twitter as being very successful for potential 2-way communication between businesspeople, however. It’s just that that’s a smaller number than the overall populace that’s going to come to Twitter for what I believe are not the best uses of this tool.

If you do use Twitter for business purposes and still quit after a month, well, a month is really not giving yourself or your brand much time to work at all. And when you start on Twitter, do you really think people are waiting for you and say, “OOH! Your brand is on Twitter! I can’t wait to talk to you!!”

Sorry. It doesn’t often work that way. You have to earn your way into this party by being a master of repeated, interesting conversation. And in the room called Twitter, you won’t get very far by exclusively selling instead of conversing. If that poses a problem for you, let me save you a month of your time before you quit. Think about something else that looks more like true advertising.

On the other hand, if you have the patience, the consistency and the openness to learning about your audience and gaining their trust, Twitter may very well be a tool that pays rewards. But like I’ve said time and time again, it’s not the only tool in the branding toolbox you should use either.

If fewer people would stop looking for the Perfect Social Networking Tool that can we can rely on and instead use different tools for different purposes (friendships for one avenue, work relationships for another), maybe there won’t be a need for as many Twitter users to become Twitter Quitters.