The Social Path

Twitter.com pageviews dropped 8% in July.

If you’ve been waiting for a plateau in Twitter’s popularity, this might be it. After a year of explosive growth, Twitter’s site traffic flat-lined in July, with pageviews even dropping 7.89%, according to data from Compete.com.

That makes July the first month that Twitter has seen pageviews dip since the outage-plagued days of June 2008. At that point a year ago, Twitter’s outlook seemed questionable, but soon the site had entered a period of rampaging growth that saw a 1,541% increase in pageviews from June 2008 to June 2009.

But now it seems that Twitter’s irrationally exuberant growth is coming to the end, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A quick look at the numbers for Twitter.com in July:

Unique visitors: 23,284,395
Change: +1.25%

Visits: 153,227,857
Change +1.64%

Pageviews: 1,597,786,004
Change: -7.89%

Pages per visit: 10.43
Change: -9.38%

My quick take: New users are still coming to Twitter each day, as illustrated by the modest growth in unique visitors. But loyal users are moving off-site, becoming dependant on desktop applications like Tweetdeck or mobile applications like Twitterfon instead of accessing the service directly through Twitter.com.

In April and May, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher led a blitzkrieg onto Twitter, rapidly replacing early tech adopters (and even the president) as the most-followed personalities. But it probably didn’t take long for these new audiences to become disenchanted with Twitter and begin drifting back to more intuitive sites like Facebook.

I believe Twitter is still growing quite quickly, but the number of new users must constantly outpace the number of “Twitter quitters,” who Nielsen estimates have fled the site at a rate of about 60% within a month of setting up their accounts.

Another factor that might explain the pageview drop amid an increase in overall visits: the “more button,” which Twitter.com added in March. This button extended the number of posts you saw at the bottom of the page, letting you read slightly older posts. The original system required you to click over to a separate page of older posts. It’s a subtle distinction, but one that likely decreased pageviews by letting you see more posts in one page.

So is Twitter’s slowing growth a bad thing for the site? I don’t think so. A realistic growth rate will allow Twitter to focus on improved service for users, better security and innovative models for revenue, instead of simply having to grapple with an overwhelming traffic boom.

The other benefit for marketing folks like me is that the end of the Twitter boom might help companies stop thinking of it as a novelty and start getting serious about using it as an invaluable tool for modern business.

Keeping social media sexy: a new Luckie presentation.

Hope you enjoy this presentation, which was created exclusively for the Social South conference held here in Birmingham over the weekend. Below the presentation, I've included links to a few of the sites mentioned.

Keeping Social Media Sexy

View more documents from David Griner.

Referenced links:

http://www.prototype-experience.com/

http://www.doritoslatenight.com/

http://internhero.com/

http://www.islandreefjob.com/

http://www.hostourcoast.com

http://twitter.com/foodtopia

And in case you're still interested in learning more about social media campaigns, here's a post I wrote last year about "the challenges of starting a social media campaign."

I wanted to give a big thanks to several friends who suggested campaigns to cover, especially Bill Green, who inspired the "Targets of opportunity" section by reminding me about the responsive work of El Pollo Loco and Reebok.

Everyone is embracing Twitter — except teens.

A new report from Nielsen seems to confirm what most social media folks already knew: Twitter is for adults. As you can see in the chart below, the under-25 crowd has been slow to embrace the brief-messaging service, especially compared to older age groups.

Why does this news seem so surprising? Because MySpace, Facebook and most other social sites got their start with teenagers and college students, then gradually spread into the mainstream.

Twitter is different. It serves a function that relatively few teens need. Text messaging, Facebook, online forums and massively multiplayer games allow young people to communicate in almost every way they would want.

The original intent of Twitter was to let you, essentially, text message the world. That's great for business networking, job hunting, thought leadership, brand fulfillment, growing blog readership for profit — all things that have little appeal to those of college age or younger. If your primary goal is communicating with friends, there are plenty of better options than Twitter, especially if you don't want creepy gawkers listening in.

So while it's great to see stats that prove Twitter's popularity among adults, it's hard to be too shocked. And it's also strangely refreshing to think that "the next big thing" might originate with our peers instead of our kids.

Via Mashable.