When I first read today’s eMarketer article, “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up,” my first reaction was, “Yeah, well, duh!” 
After all these months of frenetic activity to attract and capture the ‘hyper-active lead’ (Great term! Thank you, Michael Paradiso, CA Inc.), it seemed that passion had finally been replaced with common sense (or maybe just fatigue). But the article didn’t offer as much reflection on why stats might be dropping as it did a defense of Twitter and a rebuttal of how Nielsen’s stat counting could possibly be off base. Which got me to thinking…
Maybe, just maybe, Nielsen wasn’t right. As much as I’d like to see a return to less emphasis on Twitter as the ONE SINGLE panacea to all marketing woes, I figured there should be an easy way to see whether tweets were declining overall. So, I did a little digging…and came across this site: http://popacular.com/gigatweet/ which tracks tweets in real time and also offers historical stat tracking: http://popacular.com/gigatweet/analytics.php.
If these Twitter stats are accurate, the dealth knell for Twitter is waaaaay pre-mature. And any marketer who secretly – or publicly – hopes for its demise had better get in synch with the times. Twitter is here now. It may be here for quite some time. It will, no doubt, morph. It may someday be replaced (ala Second Life and MySpace) as a key channel, but for now, it’s another tool in the bag. Not the ONLY tool, but one that should be integrated seriously into a carefully planned marketing program that includes other tactics like PR, email marketing, advertising, tradeshows, events, and search marketing.
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