Twitter - can it sustain itself?

Today, we're going to look at social media and whether its power of promotion (within the entertainment industry, specifically) can sustain itself as the years progress.

Let's take Twitter as an example, particularly as it already experienced a drop in user activity in late 2009.

Twitter has already been at the receiving end of internationally-accessible criticism over its usefulness, though much of this comes from those against the social media bandwagon. Though I happen to sympathize with this crowd, I do not blind myself from understanding that Twitter's regular user base - at this time in its existence - continue to find value in it as a news feed of friends, organizations, and the like.

Therein lies Twitter's strength, as with all social media outlets - perception of usefulness. That's what has separated Twitter, Facebook, and the like from being short-lived novelties.

But can Twitter sustain itself as being useful, rather than novel? Perhaps the biggest potential threat to all social media venues are ourselves - marketers. Any overeager utilization of (or partnership with) social media organizations can turn the value of any of these services 180 degrees in the eyes of their users. (That, and hash-tag linking abuse doesn't help).

In short, Twitter feeds from popular figures in the industry have to ensure that their content matches a certain expectation as to what their followers want to read - because anything else becomes nothing more than social media spam.

Granted, there's another pitfall: Not enough content. Consider the Warner Brothers-managed feed of acclaimed director Christopher Nolan (see: ChrisNolanWB), who has reached unusual publicity levels within the general public (and particularly amongst hobbyist and independent filmmakers) for his Dark Knight series of Batman films. In short, the man himself is as visible as his movie.

Yet, there hasn't been a single post in his Twitter feed for the last two years, including any information about the production of The Dark Knight Rises, which would have easily made up the gap in information for 2012. Unsurprisingly, this feed has all of 13,939 followers, in comparison to the Facebook page for Rises, with 3,164,729 likes and extensive two-way social media activity.

Guess which social media outlet will continue to grow in traffic? Exactly.

If anything, content remains king - and if Twitter is to remain relevant, it better hope that influential users continue to use it as an additional venue to Facebook.

That said, the Christopher Nolan example does indicate one weakness of the Twitter format - despite the ability to re-tweet content, the format does not particularly lend itself to giving users the perception of two-way communication (if you ask me, using Twitter feels as if one is sifting through a huge aggregation of one-sentence press releases). On the other hand, if these re-tweets were somehow reworked as to show the resulting commentary about the previous tweet, it would give one a better feeling that there is a discussion (and two-way activity) on the site. By comparison, look at any post on Facebook filled with an active comments section below it. That's what drives community involvement - everybody loves a forum.

-Kurt Kaminer


To read more about the future of social media:

• E-Marketing for Sensible Folk: Will Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr Really Matter Five Years from Now?