The Twitter Demographic February 21, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : Off Topic , 1 comment so farI was checking out the US presidential candidates presence on various social media. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook accounts. I don’t think John McCain is on any of them as the ones I found are likely spoof accounts.
As a candidate, you can have your young, hip staff create these sites for you, but the staff can’t make them popular. Clinton’s Facebook profile has 120,000 supporters while Obama’s has 600,000. Definitely a good following for both. Obama’s substantial lead is an indication of his appeal to the Facebook demographic (not sure what this really is anymore but let’s say it’s primarily 21-34 year olds — which I am not a member, sadly). His lead over Clinton gets very interesting when looking at Twitter.
Hillary Clinton has only 473 followers on Twitter. I’m pretty sure this is her official Twitter profile as it is the most popular Clinton one and the tweets seem official (albeit boring as hell). Now looking at Barack Obama’s, he has 6,661 followers (some are pretty interesting)! Clearly, a domination in this demographic. Which leads of course to, what is the “Twitter demographic”? Lonely, Prius-driving, 20-somethings (Barack’s base!) is a popular consensus, but Twitter is becoming pretty mainstream pretty fast. I don’t have an empirical stereotypical profile for the demographic, but it is clearly somehow favored to Obama.
The gap between Clinton and Obama on Twitter really deserves some analysis. One thing I noticed is that if you follow Obama, he’ll follow you back. Clinton doesn’t do this, so maybe Barack’s approach has some appeal for people to tell others that they can have him follow them too. Also, his tweets are inspiring and informative, while Hillary’s sound like a to-do list.
If I were an aspiring intern on the Obama campaign, I’d do a quick research study to find out why he is dramatically more appealing to the Twitter crowd than Clinton. Take the results to the campaign leadership (go over your boss’ head if you have to) and outline a targeted campaign for volunteers and votes. You will be guaranteed a plum position in an Obama administration. And when you figure out the Twitter demographic and get your promotion, please send me the research results so I can target the same people. Thanks and you’re welcome.
Business model based on another’s shortcomings? January 22, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a commentI saw the announcement when I logged into Twitter about their service going down for two hours tonight.
This isn’t something new as we all heard about their outage during the MacWorld conference as well as a general trend of their uptime edging more towards downtime. It got me thinking about business models that focus heavily on another company’s shortcomings. I guess that is really how startups get their start anyway because one’s failings create opportunities.
At MessageDance, we have a new service that sends our users’ messages to Twitter (by email or through MessageDance.com) and will batch them up for delivery if Twitter is down. This is great during periods when Twitter has these infrastructure issues, but what about when they get it together? If you’re a one-trick pony company, then that’s about it for you. Your best hope is for grabbing as many users as you can and then figure out how to serve them after the storm has passed (any good examples out there?). The good thing about us is that it is just a nice feature that came about because of another’s shortcoming, but it isn’t the meat of our offering — it’s still all about Just One Email.