Our 2010 Predictions for Twitter

Most psychics are busy this time of year making predictions about what’s going to happen next year. While we won’t pretend to have the ability to peer deeply into the mysteries of the future, we’re willing to go out on a limb and make some predictions about what to expect from Twitter in 2010.

At first glance, in may seem foolish of us to step into this arena, but we are TwitterFools after all. Besides, we won’t use a Ouija board or tea leaves to make our predictions. Instead, we’ll try to identify some trends that are already in play, and predict what we think is likely to occur in twenty ten, as next year will be remembered.

Twitter Traffic

Twitter really entered the world consciousness in 2009. At the beginning of the year, there were fewer than 7 million regular Twitter users per month, and is expected to reach 18 million users by the end of this year [source: http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/twitter-2009-stats/] We expect that the numbers will hold roughly steady in the beginning of 2010, and will likely spike upwards again as important events occur during the year. The upcoming US midterm elections, as well as a plethora of summer blockbusters or celebrity gossip will get people tweeting. In addition, the fact that more Twitter users are also members of other social media sites like Facebook, means that the potential for crossover is high. Facebook, which has a number of easy integration options with Twitter, is expect to reach 350 million users this month. [source: http://mashable.com/2009/12/02/facebook-350-million-users/] That means there is a large number of people that are not yet on Twitter, but have all the tools they need to sign up and participate. Don’t be surprised if that starts to happen more in 2010.

Shifting Demographics

The early adopters of Twitter were mainly adults that hadn’t caught the social media wave. Since that time, the average Twitter user has become progressively younger, and Twitter has developed a very mainstream appeal. Currently, most tweeple are likely to be on Facebook or other social sites, which means they’re adding Twitter to their mix of social media connections rather than using Twitter exclusively. Interestingly, the largest proportion of new Twitter users are younger (between 25 and 40), college educated, African American women. We suspect that the Twitter demographic will continue to move toward younger users during 2010, and as it does, we’ll likely see a rise in the proportion of users who are in college rather than freshly graduated.

If that continues, then we’ll probably see Twitter remain largely a social medium rather than a business medium, although business opportunities surrounding Twitter certainly exist. Not surprisingly, we expect the role of Twitter in education to increase as the Twitter demographic gets younger. Teachers, particularly those in cash-strapped public schools, are adept with leveraging whatever works, and if they see their students increasingly using Twitter, we’ll probably see more educators using Twitter as an extension of their mission. Hey, the same thing happened with the advent of the telephone and email, why not Twitter?

Emerging Information Prosumers

As an up-to-the-second information portal, Twitter is state-of-the-art. That’s six hyphens in one sentence, so you know it has to be true. Still, Twitter users are not just passively consuming information created by other users. Twitter users are also producing information, making them information prosumers. We expect this trend to continue across the spectrum of Twitter subject areas: More and more Twitter users are going to be producing new and compelling content in addition to consuming content from other users. This gets back to the entire notion of Twitter as a community of bright people, all with something interesting to say.

Political Involvement, Activism, and News Reporting

As we saw in 2009 during the protests surrounding the apparently fraudulent Iranian elections, we expect to see Twitter sizzle whenever there are mass demonstrations or emergencies around the world. Since 2010 is a midterm election year in the U.S., we would expect that there will be plenty of tweets available from various campaign events. In addition, the state of the global economy and touchy political issues like health care reform and global climate change will continue to provide plenty of opportunities for people to voice their thoughts, comments, hints, and even accusations, on Twitter.

One area that’s relatively new is the use of Twitter as a polling and public-opinion tool. With a little software, a website, and the right hash-tags, polling companies could take our pulse and gather feedback pretty easily over Twitter. We think the savvy ones will do so.

Also, something that’s relatively new is that news outlets are increasingly creating a Twitter presence. This is happening across all levels of the news media, from your local stations, to celebrity newscasters on CNN and other major networks. Many of these, like other good Twitter users, are prosumers – sharing news as it happens, but they also provide an almost direct line to the newscasters for your tweets. For example, CNNs Rick Sanchez (@richsanchezcnn) will often stream his social media ticker while he’s reporting or interviewing someone, and that level of exposure regularly creates a frenzy of tweets during his show. We expect to see more of this in 2010, with additional media personalities leveraging their celebrity to gain multitudes of followers and gathering instant feedback, while providing potential air-time for anyone who tweets them while they’re taping.

At the same time that more traditional media are incorporating Twitter, we are finding new ‘real-time’ news aggregators who are leveraging Twitter to provide both compelling and focused news resources. As we wrote in our post earlier this year about Utah Tweets – the Twitter stream provides all the data one needs to create a rich, up-to-the-second news outlet covering a full host of simmering topics.

The Culture of Celebrity

Twitter, like many other media, is very much connected to our celebrity culture. We expect 2010 to see Twitter continuing to provide fans far and wide the ability to interact with their favorite stars, or to gossip about them, celebrate their success, lament their foibles, or even mourn their passing. If 2009 taught us anything, it’s that many of us really do idolize our celebrities, and that has spilled onto Twitter in a big way. If you don’t believe that, Ima let you finish, but Twitterfools has the best Twitter commentary of all time.

Real-Time Search

With Google, Bing, and now Yahoo incorporating tweets in real-time search results we’d like to predict that the tweets of the future will become even more pithy, but admittedly that is a stretch. However, with Google’s Twitter search results, at least, revealing the destination of shortened urls, we are pleased to say that more transparency is coming to Twitter search. As yet, that transparency isn’t available on Twitter’s own search results.

2010 Business Trends

One of our major predictions is that we here at Twitterfools will be covering the new and exciting ways businesses will be using Twitter in the coming year. As noted earlier, the shifting demographic opens up new opportunities for savvy businesses to reach out to their customers, as well as tech savvy individuals to reach out to prospective employers.

As of this past August, 40% of the Fortune 100 companies had no social media presence whatsoever [reference: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007229]. For those companies that had a presence on 2 or more social media sites or blogs, over 60% had a Twitter presence. The message here? Big businesses are experimenting with Twitter, and we expect that this trend will continue through the next year, as more large companies follow suit. Of course, once large corporations are able to figure out the value proposition inherent in the Twitterverse, we would expect to see them move quickly from experimentation toward line of business tweeting. This could mean new jobs with some of the largest companies in the world, and even new corporate-sounding titles, such as “Senior Social Media Analyst” or “Social Media Worker” with responsibilities that include building the corporation’s reputation as a responsible and useful Twitter resource.

Also, don’t expect big businesses to be alone. Many small businesses have already embraced Twitter, and we expect to see more of this through next year as well. One of the most exciting developments with Twitter is the release of the location API, which adds geolocation information to every tweet. Using location-aware services, businesses large and small will be able to provide marketing and promotional information, coupons, or alerts based on their location. Consumers, for their part, will be able to leverage this information as well, as they continue to filter their product and service searches for those within a convenient distance, or even link with followers or friends they find on Twitter within their own community.

What do you Think?

No matter what happens in 2010, we know it’s going to be exciting on many levels, and we are pretty sure that some of the changes that Twitter has gone through in the past year will make it more fun, and maybe even more profitable, in the upcoming year. As we said earlier, we’re not psychic, and we’re really very interested in what you think is going to happen with Twitter in 2010. Drop us a comment or a RT and let us know!

Tagged as: social media, Twitter, twitter demographics, Twitter Marketing, twitter traffic