To hear the media tell it Twitter is the hottest thing to hit the Internet in the last 5 years.  Of course the media has always suffered from short-term memory problems.  To hear social media evangelists tell it, your biggest earning potential this year lies with Twitter but social media evangelists frequently suffer from illusions of grandeur.  Now here’s the truth.Twitter is growing fast, really fast.  It has recently overtaken the popular social news media site Digg in terms of visitors and recently as MySpace and Facebook took slight downturns in visitors Twitter traffic continued to go up.  In addition, Twitter itself is a pretty cool communication tool and when you talk about viral marketing potential it’s definitely there.  Top that off with the fact that it’s free and you may begin to wonder if those social media mavens aren’t on to something.  The truth is, they are, but that doesn’t mean it will work for you, or that you should be spending your time there to try and win customers at leas not yet.  Here’s why.

According to Hitwise nearly 20% of the traffic leaving Twitter is going to social media sites like Facebook and MySpace.  The next biggest category is entertainment, followed by news and media, then business and finance.  About 5% are going to online shopping sites and classifieds and even fewer to education.  Here’s the graph.

If it seems like the potential for traffic has diminished a bit based on the next moves of the Tweeple out there, you’re right, but that’s not all.  If you’re not Tweeting, but you’ve heard the media hype you may think everyone but you is using Twitter.  Not so.   Twitter just hit the 8 million user point in March according to Compete.  That may seem like a lot, but it that’s less than one account for every New Yorker.   If you’re a local business and you break that down to how many people in your city are on Twitter chances are far greater that your potential client or costumer isn’t on twitter than that they are.  The fast growth of Twitter means this may change quickly.   Nick O’Neill of the Social Media Times predicts that there will be 50 million user accounts by the end of the year.  Will they all be legitmate and active Twitter accounts?  Probably not, but that’s another story.

My recommendation is that you not spend your time trying to get new  local clients and customers from Twitter right now, but check back for future posts on how you may be able to use Twitter to better server your customers and keep them coming back to you.

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