Taking Flight Again: Twitter Is Making A Comeback

While it's future seemed to be somewhat on the rocks for awhile, Twitter seems to have bounced back to relative stability, posting a second quarter of profits and showing substantial user growth.

_______________________

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski from Music 3.0

For a while it looked like Twitter would eventually become a casualty of the social media wars, as its user base had plateaued and it continued to lose money. That now looks to be in the past as Twitter has just posted its second consecutive solid quarter of profits. On top of that, the service has actually added another 6 million users in the last quarter as well.

Those new users were about 5 million more than projected so both Wall Street and stockholders were impressed, meaning that there’s still a lot of life left in the company. It’s one thing to have new users though, but the real number that’s important is how many of those are active users. That’s where Twitter actually shined in that active users also grew 10 percent year over year, which is pretty impressive compared to where the service was at year ago.

I believe that Twitter is certainly a valuable tool to have in an artist’s social media toolbox, but the question really is, “How important is it?”

As with all social networks, if an artist knows that it has a lot of fans using it then it’s wise to at least take a look. Social media promotion is time consuming though, so the priority then becomes, “Which social network will be the biggest bang for my buck?” Realistically, an artist can’t really service more than 2, 3 at most, social networks with losing creative time or diluting one’s efforts. It’s best to pick those 2 or 3 and concentrate on them first before venturing into yet another one.

While artists still do have big followings on Twitter (6 out of the top 10 are artists, with Katy Perry at #1 with over 106 million), it’s starting to seem that politics and sports are much hotter topics on the service. Then again, if your followers are there, that’s all that really matters, as long as you can reach them.