I recently produced a post regarding Twitter being in its death throws and received a query from one of my readers on it:

Thanks for your thoughts on Twitter. I am interested in where you think those who have found Twitter useful in the past might migrate to. Forums and blogs are invaluable sources of interacting with like minded marketers, but where do you think things are trending, if ultimately away from Twitter?

Which is a great question.  Let me recap just a little bit.  In the previous article I talked about how Twitter had its uses but in my opinion those are a bit limited.  I think the usefulness of Twitter isn’t to any specific form of contact or method of engagement.  I think it’s very dynamic, as social media tends to be, because we’re dealing with people and growing communities.  That kind of thing is very fluid, without any solid form or color.  That means that like all things, what works for one won’t work for another.  Twitter has a lot of limitations that are being clouded in a lot of hype right now, however it’s still working to some degree for a few primary purposes.

Twitter is a useful tool for listening, as long as you know how to tune out the noise.  Companies like Ford have social media customer service agents that scour the web in places like Twitter and other social media networks looking for dissatisfied customers that they can reach out to.

For anyone who is trying to reach out and touch someone (minds out of the gutter people) then any social network can be effective as long as you’re managing the engagement properly.  The problem with Twitter is that among the select few who are actively hunting for specific people, there are a LOT of people who are running around the party speaking gibberish and just making noise.  It’s a room filled to the brim with talking heads, yes-men and parrots.

Where do I see people migrating to as the novelty wears off?  My initial reaction is to simply spit back “Facebook”, but then they aren’t really moving away from Twitter and moving toward Facebook - most people are already on Facebook.  It’s the social media giant with by the far the largest number of users hands down.  If you combined the user counts of Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn you still wouldn’t hit the total user count on Facebook.

And that’s assuming you account for all the fake profiles.

I predict that Facebook is going to continue to improve on an already solid network for businesses.  Thus far they’ve done a fairly good job at giving businesses of any size a place to establish a face and personality, with a unique method of engagement that puts a company on the same level as the people.  Through the profile pages of businesses, consumers now have an outlet to like, enjoy and interact with a brand that they support.  Likewise, those who don’t like a particular brand can throw eggs all they like.

Facebook offers far more potential, but that’s not saying that it’s the end all be all of social media marketing either.  For every Goliath, there is a David.  I highly doubt that our David is going to be Twitter.  Google has tried and failed (a few times).  Until one comes along, Facebook will continue to be the go to place.

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