Twitter must be hitting the tipping point soon

On Friday I set up the MarketingFundi Twitter account. Although I have had a small and not particularly active personal presence on Twitter since March 2007 - yip I’m one of the oldies - this is the first time I am seriously experimenting.

Friday is a good day to start as the Twitter world goes into a #followfriday mode. In principle one sends out messages promoting one’s Twitter friends to others so that one can meet and greet new folk and expand ones own Twitter follower base.

For about three hours of work of checking Twitter profiles and following ones I thought might be of interest to Marketing Fundi I ended up with about 200 twitterers that I was following and 60 or so followers by the end of Friday.

This bit of work created a momentum of its own and since that time without further promotion from myself I have now 331 followers which is getting to a better ration to the number of 420 that I am following.

Enough of the stats. The point is that Twitter has an invisible engine room now. And it’s driven by business interests. No longer is it a social networking place. That is social as in people connecting with other people.

Oh sure, some people are still using Twitter to connect with others. But what has driven Twitter close to or already over the tipping point is that business interests have sat up and said - be there money to be made.

The followers now attaching themselves to me on an hourly bases have been driven to me by software that collects and accumulates Twitter profiles. There are a myriad of little apps and schemes available to drive your follower numbers into the thousands. Or so they say.

I can see it happening. I’m getting invites even though I have done nothing to encourage the growth. Check this graph on TechCrunch to see Twitter’s phenomenal growth. Of course the publicity generated by Oprah and Ashton Kutcher’s little challenge all helped.

As with all society in general Twitter is also a reflection of our world and amongst the followers I have had to weed out the porn invites and other unsavory bits. One amused me the most. A half naked avatar with the words of “I’m a nice girl’ in the profile. Yeah right.

I’m not opposed to this at all. It’s just something that people need to make a note of. What started off as a service for folk to communicate with each other and share what they might be doing at that moment is morphing into a serious business tool.

Do follow Marketing Fundi on Twitter. And there’s the RSS feed as well or e-mail newsletter. Loads of ways to keep in touch. Thanks!