Twitter is every celebrities favorite place to litter scornful, insenstive brain vomit — I'm lookin at you Alec Baldwin— and quickly have their secretary retract them with a formal apology the next day. With almost 150 million accounts and only 3/4 of those are spambots, it's a wonder how the social network for the attention deficit is in decline.
But ever since Twitter's IPO went public, it's user growth and share price have been drastically falling. According to a study released in eMarketer user growth rate is slowing considerably, from 19.4% in 2013 to below 10% in 2015, and slowing further to 6.4% by 2018. Of the 66% of Americans on social network sites, only 15% are on Twitter and 40% of active users never tweet a peep. One half of one percent of users create 50% of the content that makes up your twitter feed, and the engagement is usually link spamming anyway. But hey, who doesn't love following blind links to burn belly fat.
I can keep going. The average Twitter user has 27 followers but 25% of users have zero followers. In a world where Facebook reaches 1.3 billion eyeballs everyday, it's going to be a tough road to hoe if Twitter wants to keep it's stock from crashing into nothing.
According to Time magazine, CEO Dick Costolo and company are making drastic changes, such as adding photos to users’ timelines and presenting conversations in a format that’s less confusing, are already producing positive results. It seems the way to beat compete Facebook, is to become Facebook's carbon copy.
The hash tag twitterverse is a one dimensional super highway of information inundation. News outlets love it because it gets them page views which gets them ad revenue. Speaking of which, Twitter's ad prices are falling dramatically — in every quarter since 2012 the decline has hovered at or around 18%. And now that they are a publicly traded company, making money is more important than #ThrowbackThursday or #MeaninglessMonday.
But I won't deny Twitter's role in social uprisings, as long as the government's don't block usage (as the Venezuelan government seems have done recently) and it's ability to break news quicker and than it seems to unfold.
Even still, the oversimplification of information serves no one other than the people behind the server. While Zuckerberg, Costolo and NSA aggregate our online identities to keep tabs on our behavior and sell us more crap we don't need, we alone are the victims. When our day to day is nothing more than the punctuation between hastags, tweets, and fodder for status updates we are obviously missing something huge. Keep your 140 characters to yourself. Unplug your computer. Go outside and ponder the unrivaled gift that is every single moment you spend in awe of your consciousness and I promise you'll forget your followers for the flowers.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
