Digital Design Blog

Advertisers Catch The Twitter Bug, But Too Small To Matter?

Advertisers are starting to move, en masse, towards Twitter but is it too small to matter? Southwest Airlines and JetBlue have taken the lead and Zappos.com uses the service ardently. Last week, in the throes of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had a great conversation with Mary Jane Irwin from Forbes on the future of Twitter and advertising. Her piece, “Twittering King” ran on Forbes.com this week.

Choice bit:

Unconventional groups have been picking it up, starting with mothers and journalists. “Something that really helped was early adopters getting their family on it,” Stone says. Companies including Southwest Airlines (nyse: LUV - news - people ), JetBlue, and–of all things–Fox Chicago have set up accounts. Comcast (nasdaq: CMCSA - news - people ) uses its Twitter to fend off criticism. CNN and The Onion offer breaking news headlines.

Chief Executive Tony Hsieh has started a Twitter presence for his online shoe site Zappos.com. One recent Tuesday afternoon, Hsieh’s tweets revealed he had attended a meeting with eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) Chief Executive John Donahoe and later ordered tomato soup, a Reuben sandwich and pomegranate mimosa.

“Told eBay CEO and everyone else to embrace Twitter,” he wrote. Hsieh has also used the platform to reward his followers with everything from free shoes to Van Halen concert ticket.”

In the piece I said that Twitter was a valuable part of any communications strategy. After all, while the user base may be small it’s highly influential. She pegs the active user base at around 80,000 uniques.

I also added that advertisers who put Twitter to use are not using the service to reach the masses. This week HitWise came out with some interesting data around Twitter usage — it’s growing fantastically. YOY visits to Twitter.com are up 8 flold, according to Hitwise. And, more recently, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to surge, up 60% in the past month.

However, the most telling data, Heather Hopkins writes, comes from comparing Twitter with other social media properties:

“The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.”

In the end, today Twitter is still a niche brand with a niche audience (some could argue super niche). But it has a highly influential audience and one that marketers and advetisers shouldn’t ignore based purely on size and reach.