How long can the Twitter death knell ring before it gets remixed and turned into a dance track? New stats from Hitwise suggest that visits by Twitter users and first-time visitors have leveled off, but other vital signs for the microblogging website are stronger than ever. Exhibit A: 100 million dollars (somewhere, Dr. Evil’s pinky is twitching).
Yes, Twitter CEO Evan Williams officially confirmed today that the website has received a “significant” amount of venture capital funding from a group of investment firms that includes Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and several others.
What Twitter will do with the money remains to be seen, but with such significant financial backing, Williams may soon be saying of the Hitwise numbers, a la Mark Twain, “This report of Twitter’s death was an exaggeration.”
So what’s Twitter good for, anyway? Well, one answer to that question would be another number: 20% (somewhere, Dr. Evil is scratching his head). Jim Jansen, a professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, was part of a team of researchers that looked into the frequency of brand mentions in Twitter posts. The team’s findings were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology. According to their research, a brand is mentioned in about 20% of tweets.
“Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services,” Jansen told Penn State Live. Jansen predicts that Twitter will be around for a long time to come, because individuals and businesses are using it for creative social media marketing and are actually turning a profit. Brand awareness and customer relationships are also strengthened through online engagement.
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