“Why” people don’t use Twitter is a simple question that is always asked and surprisingly, has a series of simple answers to it. For whatever reason, we have all been trained to believe that everything requires an elaborate and sophisticated answer. Statistics have proved to be powerful however they don’t show us everything. The misconception is that crunching the numbers will provide you with a set of circumstances that will explain the issue at hand. But that only explains one side of the story.
By Salon de Maria
At one point in the time, the tweet-storm was impressive and moving towards the must-have realm. Twitter landing pages were all over the airwaves as the “fellow me” epidemic seemed to be taking over. And as soon as it started, it ended. That’s not to say Twitter has become obsolete but it caters to people have something to say to “followers”, whereas Facebook allows people to say something to “friends”. This is only where it begins.
One of the reasons I hear about all the time is that people simply don’t understand the Twitter messaging process. As easy as it is to use and as web-savvy as we have become, the “@” characteristic throws everyone off. When speaking of the “#” trending characteristic, I always get “why not simply track the topic without the ‘#’. Earth Hour and #Earth Hour are the same thing to me, so why would I ‘#’?” And why would we?
The “so why would I” comment always seems to come up when talking about Twitter. People seemingly would rather update “friends” than “followers”, since more often than not our “friends” have had real world experiences associated with them. When it comes down to it, social media users have better usability with Facebook than Twitter because they can actually relate to what Facebook has to offer. It’s more a personal trait than a functional one.
And the one thing many people have yet to accept is the idea of having virtual friends, which I think is one of Twitter’s biggest downfalls. Real-world friends as opposed to virtual ones is a whole topic on its own however we can’t help but naturally associate ourselves with people we’ve actually met. Though, there is still another underlying characteristic that we rarely think about.
The problem with Twitter is that Facebook does everything that Twitter can do. When you break it down, we are monogamous consumers. The majority of the things we own we only have one of. Most of us don’t have two TV’s in the same room, we hardly use two laptops in the same moment and if you owned two cars, you would only drive one at a time.
Most of us are monogamous consumers not because we can’t watch two TV’s or use more than one laptop at the same time (though we clearly can’t drive more than one car at a time) but because to a lot of people it doesn’t make any sense to act in this way. We are monogamous consumers because we usually own only one of “that” item. Not only does it not make sense to us to have more than one of something but quite simply, a lot of us can’t afford it. And since time is money, most of us won’t spend time on anything but on what we already have. So I guess Facebook it is.
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Hi T. Great comment and I can understand some of the points you bring up. In reality the article was targeted towards understanding why people don't use it. But when it actually comes to using social media there are benefits on both sides, both for the user and people watching it.
Understandably some people don't see the value in things such as Twitter however I would argue that this due in large fact to our perceptions and systems we've been raised by. The fact of the matter is you don't have to car about what people are actually doing however is value in knowing that people can share information with you that you normally wouldn't receive. I definitely believe in have virtual friends and acquaintances.
Further, when it comes to the numbers of social media right now Facebook is around the 400 million mark and Twitter has recently hit about 105 million. This is a great for marketers and business because there actually is value associated to these numbers. In a recent study, Facebook Fans have been worth from anywhere from 0.44$ to about just over 3$, So there is value on the business side of this.
In reality, not everything is going to be for everyone and different people will fall into different segments. However it cannot be denied that social media is here to stay. This article was meant to explain why people don't use it and you brought up some great points to elaborate on that.
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