Just my two cents Archives - Page 16 of 22

I guess that by now everybody has read Twitter’s blog post and other sources saying that the number of tweets is growing, some of them shouting out how much people tweet these days.

Tweets, those timely bits of information, have found a special place in today’s global network of people. It is simple to use Twitter. The micro-blogging platform is accessible and great to inform your followers or friends about what you’re doing, thinking, bookmarking, blogging about, etc. Twitter also has that community building aspect that is missing in IM and SMS, other ways to chat or share information.

Those are not the only reasons for the success of Twitter. There is the effect one tweet can have: speed, reach (the power of retweets), global spread, you name it. On top of that, Twitter can be accessed through more than 50,000 third party Internet and mobile applications, giving users enough flexibility.

Yesterday, Compete.com got some new traffic data out. The big news (well, maybe it’s not news anymore) is that Facebook is now the second most visited site in the US with 134 million unique visitors last month.

Now, what should we make of these numbers? We know that Facebook has a lot of users, we know it’s been the king of social networks for a while now and since yesterday we also know that it’s the second most visited site in the U.S. (well, at least last month).

But does it really matter in the end? In the early days of online marketing and advertising, having the most eyeballs was a must for every online publisher and medium since eyeballs meant revenues: CPM, display ads, remember?

And, with Facebook changing its strategies and policies (more about these policies later) very often lately, it’s not really cashing in on eyeballs. Remember what we wrote earlier this week about that.

OK, Facebook has other sources of revenues, but it’s time the company makes up its mind. It’s increasingly confusing advertisers but agencies too.