Twitter Loyalty
May 29th, 2008 | Categories: blogs, chat, content, networks, off topic, social media, trends, web issuesHas Twitter loyalty suffered from all the recent outages? Or does the fact that the community continues to thrive indicate that loyalty is stronger than ever? So-called Twitter competitors, such as Pownce and Jaiku, continue to grow as well, but we have yet to see a mass exodus from Twitter despite its poor service record.
Nowadays, Twitter outages are so common that I come to expect an error every time I arrive on the site. I’m delightfully surprised when I am greeted by a fully functional service. Most users wouldn’t stand for this, but Twitter users are forced to. Any regular service would now be defunct given the same set of circumstances. The user base would have defected. But Twitter is the industry pioneer. All the big names are there and they use the service on a daily basis. Twitter is the place to be.
Is loyalty truly at stake or do users simply have an innate dependence on Twitter itself? I truly believe the latter to be the case. The opportunity cost of not being on Twitter is just too high. Users have no choice but to put up with the poor service. Perhaps at some point users will become so infuriated that they finally decide to leave and join a new service, but I don’t see this happening any time soon.
Tags: community, jaiku, loyalty, opportunity cost, outages, pioneer, pownce, service, twitter
June 10th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Twitter’s ability to go from weakness to weakness, and still maintain and grow its user base is a phenomena. But I think you hit the nail on the proverbial head by pointing out that many people need to be on Twitter - at least until someone decides it’s time to go and try something else.