Yahoo Finance Twitter offers an object lesson in engagement
Even though I’ve been using the service multiple times a day for more than three years, I still get these e-mail messages, which drive me nuts: “@SoandSo, @ThisGuyYouKnow and @FamousPerson have Tweets for you!”
Come on, Twitter: Do you really need to nudge me to keep coming back so much?
After this week’s earnings report, however, we should probably all expect a lot more cajoling (it not outright begging) to use Twitter more often and in more thoughtful ways. Even though revenue beat expectations in the last three months of 2013, an increase in monthly active users of just 3.8 per cent from the previous quarter failed to impress investors, who pummeled the stock down in response, sending it down 24 per cent on Thursday.
It’s not just about the overall volume of monthly active users, though. Twitter also admitted that the number of times they updated the “timeline”, which shows all the posts users see on Twitter, 7 per cent less often than the previous quarter. It’s one thing to see overall growth stall, but if those that remain on the service are less engaged, it makes Twitter seem like it’s somehow on the wane.
What investors may not realize is that for all the hype, adoption of Twitter is still a work in progress for many people, even the young people who you might expect to be its biggest fans. Chris Conrath is an instructor in online PR and social media at Centennial College in Toronto, and he told me that even students in their mid-20s see Twitter as a relatively new platform that requires some understanding of how to balance it for both personal and professional use.
‘It’s a great avenue for content, but at times it becomes a bit of a firehose,” said Conrath, who is also an account director at Environics Communications in Toronto. “We’ve been focusing on figuring out what you really want to do on Twitter. It’s about creating your lists (of people to follow on Twitter) or using hashtags to filter out what’s important.”
As the next generation of marketers learns more about how to make the best use of Twitter, engagement may improve across the board. As for the current generation of marketers, they may need to learn it’s more than just spewing out tweets. According to a report in December from Chicago-based software consultancy Sprout Social, many companies aren’t doing a great job of responding to messages from consumers on Twitter: on average, the time it took for a brand to get back to a question or comment on Twitter was 7.9 hours, a dip of more than 20 percent year over year.
In other words, everyone’s still figuring out not only how to sift through all the information on Twitter but how to then interact with each other in a more timely, dynamic manner. As that collective understanding among companies and consumers matures, engagement rates and even the number of users may kick back into growth mode. Social media is supposed to be about digital conversations, and the best conversations tend to stop and start again. Twitter’s earnings might just be a sort of awkward pause.
