The Future of Twitter – When Will it Finally Evolve?

I've been reading with interest the opinions of marketers I respect such as Ryan Deiss and John Reese about Twitter. Certainly the dust has not settled on whether it ultimately proves to be little more than a fad or if it manages to reinvent itself into something that actually has a workable application.

Because, right now, it's a mess. The total tonnage of noise just overwhelms the system. Quite frankly if someone was responding to a tweet of mine, I'm not even sure how it would get on my radar screen. The sheer din of sales pitches and idle blather drowns out what could be beneficial, interesting or thought provoking.

So should we give up on Twitter altogether as John Reese suggests? The argument for doing so is certainly persuasive. Most people who sign up for Twitter abandon their usage of it within 45 days. Standing amid the crowd in Times Square on New Year's Eve may be an exciting experience, but do you really want to do that every day? That's Twitter in its current format. Crowded. Noisy. The sheer lack of order overwhelms those of us who, for lack of a better term, want to actually use it for something.

Yet, there are so many people proselytizing about it. So many voices saying that "It's working for them." What precisely it's doing is a bit unclear, but still can that many voices be wrong? Maybe it's me. Maybe if only I was doing Twitter better it would work for me too.

Or maybe not.

Which is why when a voice such as John Reese says that Twitter is a waste of time and until they get their act together (his words not mine) he's unhooking from it, we need to be paying attention.

Ryan Deiss has a different take on the subject and it's one that I've always gravitated to since Twitter reached critical mass in popularity. His belief is that the benefit of Twitter is primarily as a lead generation tool. It reaches people who you otherwise would miss. Thus in Ryan's mind Twitter is simply another medium to distribute our message. As long as your prospective client is reading their Tweets, this approach has a lot of merit.

Not surprisingly the real trick is to get people from Twitter to your website or sales page. Thus once again the role of the copywriter comes to the forefront. In fact in many ways we've come full circle, back to the days when writing tiny classified ads was a primary method for generating leads. With Twitter's 140 character limits, hooking attention with just a few words becomes an important skill if you're going to use Twitter as Ryan suggest.

Regardless of what camp you're in, it's clear that Twitter has entered the awkward adolescence phase. Do we ship the kid off to boarding school and check in with him when he's finally matured? I'm not sure what the answer is but it is clear that the days of Twittering for the sake of Twittering are drawing to a close.