Celebrating #Twitter7
There's an old English saying, “Keep a thing seven years, and you'll always find a use for it.” Today is Twitter's 7th birthday, which we observe on the day @jack first tweeted. Since then, we've seen breathtaking velocity in Twitter's growth, which is due entirely to your many uses of it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has periodically used milestone posts to frame the service's expansion, from its 2011 numbers update to its 2012 year-end review. The seventh-anniversary marker arrives after Twitter completed its rollout of the redesigned service, while same-day coverage puts the audience at 200 million users; that scale gives added weight to evidence linking Twitter activity with television ratings.
First-order effects
- Twitter gains a clearer scale argument with broadcasters and advertisers: a 200 million-user service can make social activity a more meaningful companion signal for television audiences.
- The anniversary coverage reinforces Twitter's public identity as a mass communication service built around varied user uses, rather than a product change aimed at a single device or feature.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasters and audience-measurement firms face greater incentive to incorporate Twitter activity into programming and advertising analysis after a study found a correlation with TV ratings.
- Twitter's platform and product teams gain pressure to preserve searchable, timely public conversation, since that activity underpins its value to media partners.
Third-order effects
- If social activity continues to track television audiences, media measurement may broaden from panel-based viewing metrics toward platform-generated engagement signals, increasing the strategic importance of large public conversation networks.
The trend: Twitter's growth is making real-time social conversation an increasingly valuable layer of television audience measurement and media distribution.