Two weeks ago I heard the latest gossip: Madonna has dumped her boyfriend via Twitter. The first thing that came to my mind was: “This is the greatest marketing Twitter has ever had”. Today I had some funny feeling and said to myself “Let me check the Alexa ranking for Twitter, maybe “the Madonna effect” is visible”. Boy I was right. You can see dramatic traffic increase that occured at the exact same time when this gossip arrived! Brutal.
Read the rest of the article with graphs and evidences…
The Twitter. Second largest social buzz gadget. After Facebook. It has been there for a long time, but exploded just recently. The brand of Twitter had this constant problem – it was too nerdy, too techy, and unlike Facebook, the leaders of Twitter were considered plain computer geeks.
But who could have thought that such a minor incident in the celebrity world could change things literally over night? On March 27, 2009 Madonna announced that she dumped her boyfriend via Twitter. And she did not even use her Twitter account, but her manager’s (Guy Oseary).
The news spread like wildfire in the gossip world. Millions of people suddenly started thinking:
“Madonna and Twitter. Wow. So even Madonna is using it. And I thought it was for nerds. Wow. I must start using that thing right away. That way I will probably meet celebrities like Madonna or cool people like her. Lets all use Twitter! I will tell all my gossip friends about this!”
The result? I think the graph speaks for itself:
This is the result of Madonna’s single tweet. A dramatic traffic increase. And stays up there!
So what happened? My theory is that new people are the ones who are new to Internet as well. People who joined Internet just recently to read gossip on PerezHilton.com and to chit-chat on Facebook. Non-tech savvy folks. Some of them probably never heard of Twitter before.
The conclusion? If you want people to start using your site, get a celebrity to do it. And give people some solid proof that the celebrity’s account is not fake.
Money can not buy the results.
4 Responses
Wow, this is excellent! I never thought about this that way. And I must agree with you, some results can’t be bought with a lot of money.
April 17 – Oprah joins twitter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPP-dlYQCMg
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104383
“By the end of the first night, Winfrey had sent 10 tweets and attracted 242,196 followers.”
I wonder how much it would cost to have Mrs. Jolie’s comment on this? :)
Anyway, I’ll invite you to promote my website, that’s for sure ;)
I see no advantage in using Twitter, other than the possibility to receive a quick answer to a question and networking (which I don’t need from Twitter) Twitter it’s just a mini-blog – nothing more, nothing less. Why use a mini-blog when you have a blog, why use so many services to do ONE thing. Blog+RSS reader+google are the things that I need.