Are Twitter and WordPress.com Competing Services?
In the world of blogging, there are many services that bloggers regularly use. New services generally take a longer time to “catch on” compared to larger services that we all know and use. I’ll get right into the topic of discussion, and that is whether Twitter and WordPress.com (or any other service for that matter) can truly work together, or whether they exist as separate modes of communication.
As I’ve said countless times in the pay about Google Analytics and other services that make it easy to track your stats directly on your site, these are always the most accurate methods of judging traffic, but they are also only part of the story.
Compete and comScore have shown that while Twitter saw exceptional growth in the beginning of the year, WordPress is now apparently increasing in traffic at a rapid pace while the micro-format of Twitter is “dying.” Look at Google Trends, and you’ll find that to be quite the opposite, with most people searching for and referencing Twitter, rather than WordPress.
First Point – The “Inaccuracies” of the Analytics
If these sites could accurately portray the services in terms of the number of active users, and how they use the services, it might be a more accurate comparison, but they don’t. They are comparing traffic figures primarily to the main domain, and the traffic from both Compete and comScore are generally U.S.-based, so any traffic outside of the U.S. might not be weighed in as heavily.
I’ve seen huge swings in traffic from Compete, especially – if you have a sample size that is too small, it’ll determine that you only had a handful of visitors, so month-to-month, there can also be huge swings. Therefore, we also have to take into account that while this “flattening” trend has taken place for about four months, it is not an indication of the future.
There have been less media sources talking about Twitter, primarily due to the fact that the “new” factor of it is wearing off. You heard about Twitter, you signed up, and you either liked it or didn’t.
Millions of users are now no longer visiting any page of Twitter because they can do all their tweeting from a mobile phone, a desktop app, or another web app. API calls are not counted within these analytics services, and only Twitter really knows how many total active users there are.
Second Point – Blogging and What it Means
A majority of people who signed up for Twitter during the past few months likely have never run a blog or have never published content on the web outside of a personal Blogger/WordPress-powered blog, or MySpace/Facebook. People who have signed up for Twitter are not generally looking to grow their blog’s following, and they are just on there to share their thoughts and connect with others.
With WordPress.com, it’ll take a much longer time to develop a sense of “popularity.” You have readers and visitors, but people would rather see immediate effects. After all, we’re now in the age of “real-time.”
Having a Twitter account can (according to the definition) mean that you are blogging, but true bloggers will just tell you that it is a method of promotion and sharing off-topic thoughts. I couldn’t write this post on Twitter without taking more than twenty tweets (at this point). Therefore, I would have to shorten this post down into a length around that of the title. How much information can I provide with that? Not too much.
I’d guess that the average post length of people who use WordPress.com is somewhat longer, in the range of 400-600 words, give or take a few hundred words. Note that this is several times larger than the average tweet, of about twenty words.
Third Point – A Personal Preference
Jotting down a few of the main ways people currently use Twitter:
- Share thoughts (mainly personal) and ideas with others.
- Communicating from one person to another in a professional manner (often using private accounts).
- “Spamming” in hopes of earning money.
- Publishing links for retweeting and sharing ideas.
- Other, less “practical” uses.
Through the main users, there are definitely sub-groups, and other uses of Twitter, but you have to understand the core base of users are not using it like a blog.
Most likely, if you’re reading this blog, you probably have a Twitter account specifically for your blog, on which you post relevant topics and links. You wouldn’t use this account for personal information, as you may very likely have a separate account.
Some people would rather keep all their personal ideas on a personal blog, but they want to share more than just 140 characters. There is a relatively low chance they will abandon Twitter just because stats prove “real” blogging is better, and vise versa.
The Pros and Cons of Each
Both Twitter and WordPress.com are considered the “top” services in their respective categories, and although Blogger is in a similar category, it might not have the same target market.
Pros – Easy to use, large network of users, quick posting, instant responses.
Cons – Character limitation (could be positive for some), no control, high spam/distraction rate.
WordPress.com
Pros – Again, easy to use, relatively low downtime, expanded thoughts, everything included.
Cons – It’s a blogging system, harder to “develop.”
As Matt Mullenweg stated, there is a very good chance that if you are using WordPress.com, you also may be using Twitter to expand upon your main ideas. You can use Twitter to aggregate your posts, while new functionality in both versions of WordPress allow similar functionality for your Twitter stream.
Conclusion
An ideal world would consist of one service that does everything. We will never have this, unless we can all think alike, and that will never happen. Large blogs would never exist without having a provider like WordPress (as an example), and Twitter probably wouldn’t exist if the all-in-one platforms weren’t created.
No matter what platform you prefer, what method you use to communicate, the most important part of the whole process is that you ARE communicating. Without this, you will just be any other person who wants to keep his or her ideas to himself/herself.
