When I started work on Twitter Power at the end of September 2008, I had about 5,000 followers. That was a pretty good amount back then: it was only a year ago that Twitter\’s blog was reporting that anyone with more than 80 followers was among the site\’s top ten percent of users.
Boy, have things changed!
In the six months since then, I\’ve picked up another 41,000 followers.
I\’d like to think that\’s because my tweets are so interesting but it\’s probably got more to do with Twitter\’s growth. In the last year, Twitter has expanded by an incredible 1,374 percent. This time last year, it had around 475,000 members. Now it has about 7 million.
But it\’s not just the rate of growth that\’s amazing. The kind of people who are using the site is fantastic too.
Just as MySpace has become the place for teenage girls who want to swap stories about their favorite bands, so Twitter has become the forum for middle-agers (yes, don\’t let iFart fool you, that\’s still me) who want to network and do business.
Twitter\’s biggest growth sector is said to be largest among the over-40s.
That\’s great news. It means that Twitter is more powerful than ever before. There are more people to connect with than ever before so you can get your network up and running faster than ever before. The people you\’ll be meeting on Twitter are likely to be serious and professional, but they will also be friendly and approachable. That\’s the kind of perfect combination we\’ve just never seen before.
But all of this growth does have a downside. With almost 50,000 followers I can\’t possibly reply to all of the tweets targeted at me. I can\’t even see all the tweets sent to me. When I did try to answer every question I received in half an hour, I ended up losing a bunch of messages to Twitter\’s limits.
But that doesn\’t mean I don\’t value every tweet I receive. I really do. Even if I can\’t answer all of them, I do try to get to as many of them as I can and I love reading them. So if I haven\’t answered one of your tweets yet, do keep writing. I really do want know what you\’re doing right now.