There’s a great article on Silicon.com about the dwindling interest in Twitter, and why companies should stay committed to social media. I say “great” because it’s by me :)

To read the full article, go to: http://www.silicon.com/management/sales-and-marketing/2010/03/22/is-twitter-on-the-wane-39745616/ and add your two bits to the comments.

Here’s the article….

While activity on Twitter continues to increase – the number of tweets per day is now approaching 50 million – this is largely due to an active core of one-in-five registered users who are becoming more and more engaged. According to marketing software company Hubspot, the average Twitter user in January 2010 had 300 followers compared to around 60 last July.

Twitter’s problem is adding to its 75 million users. Yes, it’s a considerable number, but in social media, scale is everything.

A report from research firm Barracuda Labs found that the number of new Twitter users grew just 0.34 per cent in December 2009, down from a peak of 20 per cent new users joining in April 2009. Hubspot’s figures show that the peak of new users was in March 2009 (13 per cent) and fell to four per cent in October 2009.

And these are not the first reports to identify the problem. A report in September last year from research firm Hitwise found that in 2008, Twitter accounted for 0.01 per cent of visits to all websites. By June 2009, this had climbed to 0.20 per cent before falling to 0.17 per cent in September.

I realise it’s pretty hard to get accurate stats on Twitter use because so many access the service via desktop software, but there is enough evidence to suggest that the number of people who want to use this social networking tool based solely on status updates which are broadcasted (i.e. you don’t really have control who follows you), has reached its limit.

Can you hear me?

Twitter users may have already noticed that it’s getting harder to be heard. Some highly engaged social media practitioners I know, tweeting many times per day, are reporting that it’s getting more and more difficult to grow their followers organically, especially with people who are genuinely interested in what they have to say. Instead, they are being followed indiscriminately by people who want to gain social capital, with a trigger-happy ‘retweet’ finger.

The problem may be that the noise has reached a threshold. The cacophony created by status updates from hundreds or thousands of people, proffering links to interesting articles, dipping into conversations half-way through and dull missives about lunchtime sandwiches, is obviously getting too much for some folk.

To filter out the noise, Twitter users tend to engage or converse with a smaller number of people than their following count would imply. There’s some science behind this – it’s called Dunbar’s Number, a concept coined by cognitive anthropologist Adrian Dunbar who posits that the average person cannot sustain more than 150 friendships. His work correlates with animal studies showing that this magic number crops up all over the animal world too.

Twitter: Not just for status updates anymore

So what should we read in to this? Is Twitter really on the wane?…

It’s hard to say just yet but one good sign for Twitter’s long-term health is that Twitter itself seems to recognise that being a tool that only distributes status updates is a one-trick pony. All kinds of social media from Facebook and LinkedIn to web giants like Yahoo! and Google are homing in on status and buzz. And they have a lot more to offer than Twitter.

This is probably why Twitter recently announced @Anywhere, which will allow Twitter feeds to be linked into other websites using a common API. These sites include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! and YouTube.

And if you are a LinkedIn user, you’ll know that you can already get your Twitter feed on your LinkedIn profile.

Ultimately what is happening is status updates are being commoditised, which I wrote about in more detail in a recent blog post about the future of social media.

Now I don’t think Twitter is necessarily a lost cause and will go the way of Friends Reunited. It is still a very powerful tool, and one that should not be ignored by anyone working in sales, marketing, PR, customer service or product development.

More importantly, status updates are here to stay, whichever the social network they originate from.

Keep listening and reacting

So businesses still need a Twitter strategy. But really what they need is a strategy for listening and reacting to all the social media conversations about you – whether they are on Twitter, blogs, Facebook Groups, forums, Posterous and so on.

Status updates are a revelation: you can hear what people say about you and your competitors, you can discovers flaws in your products that you didn’t realise were there, and you can find out exactly where and when customers are disgruntled.

And you can act on what you hear: change the product, contact the customer, warn the helpdesk and so on. (Marketing guru Olivier Blanchard has some interesting advice on how to turn social media listening into pan-organisational acting.)

But let’s remember the Dunbar Number and ultimately, that social media is a personal media, and companies are not individuals. You can listen, you can broadcast offers, you can respond to complaints, but don’t expect social media users to want to be your friend. They can only engage with a few people at a time, and unless you have the resources to develop a one to one relationship with your thousands/millions of customers, you will end up disappointed.

You can find other Silicon articles by myself here: http://www.silicon.com/search/stewart+baines.htm and by Anthony here: http://www.silicon.com/search/anthony+plewes.htm

Sometimes we get the opportunity to stand back from our most pressing work commitments, and gaze across the technology landscape at the changing Internet. We are frequently told that social media is a work in progress, and is still its infant phase. So let us ponder where it may go in the coming years. What follows is idle future pondering, scenarios almost. Please do not take the following as a forecast.

Twitter will not last without a radical reinvention

The increasing openness between networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – will increase. Status updates on one will be seamlessly available to all, and also embedded in Microsoft Office applications, in collaboration tools, with SMS and so on. Status will be your thoughts, your retweets and @’s and also your car’s GPS location, and your appliances’ status (you’re washing machine will let you know when the cycle is complete). In fact the ability to display status updates will be as common a function as voice: completely commoditised.

Imagine a future Facebook interface which selects your real friends, the people you have interacted with on Twitter (or the like), or that have used common hashtags. Powerful algorithms will serve up only the status and conversations you are likely to find interesting. So what value in having an army of followers that is not listening to you? Will those that are currently trying to greedily acquire social capital now find their efforts were in vain?

I believe the effect of this evolution in social media interfaces (not the networks behind them) will help to cut down a lot of the noise.  In terms of which social media applications will dominate, the winning environment will be the one with the best usability and the best distribution because being a walled garden isn’t going to last.

Junk content will get worse before it gets better

Ever wonder what happens when you pay “writers” $1 for a 1000 word? It ends up as a How-To article on websites funded by Google Adsense revenues.  Many (not all) of these sites operate without any accountability whatsoever. What’s wrong with this? People are paid a pittance to plagiarise, cut corners or simply write with fake authority about subjects they know absolutely nothing about. Hundreds of millions of pages of junk content is clogging up Google. While bedroom publishers can build an economic model based on Adsense, don’t expect any self restraint.

This is not to say that How-To sites are the only ones manipulating or exploiting dubious online content to gain Adsense revenue. There are many technology sites doing this also, grabbing articles about popular brands and scurrilously twisting the meaning into something sensational. The best of the Adsense-funded sites are enthusiasts with not enough time to check facts; the worst simply don’t care at all about veracity. Their only interest is traffic because now they have a direct correlation between views and cents.

Eventually we will stop reading and the noise will quieten down

Looking further ahead – 10 years for instance – and the verbal diarrhoea generated by UGC and copy factories will be on the wane. As more and more of the content we will view becomes video, audio and spoken-word menus, our reliance on scanning stories for what we want to know will dissipate. Natural language-based search (sometimes called the semantic web) will make it easier for us to go direct to the information we want. Intelligent agents will learn our habits and interests and will interoperate with these search tools to ensure that each search is really, really targeted. And the widespread deployment of touchscreen interfaces – in work PCs, the living room TV, in-car computer and the home control panel – will gradually break our century-old connection to the keyboard. Intelligent speech, search, profiling and interfaces could combine to end the rule of the Word on the Internet

So which of these scenarios could come true? What other futures for media/social media can you envision?

Ever wondered how Google search has joined up all bits of your life that you previously needed a secretary, PA and office assistant to accomplish? Well check out this 1 min ad – featuring the awesome band The National. Watch, learn the lyrics, buy gig tickets and plan your journey within a minute. In truth, think I need at least a whole album to plan that much, a lot of procrastinating along the way….

Google says “Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story. These videos show that anyone can do anything when paired with the power of search.” They’ve showcased some other amusing ads here. Not sure about Kerouac’s On The Road powered by search. It would kind of undermine it wouldn’t it?