According to Mitch Joel, “Twitter is mainstream”.
With more than 200 million users, there is no doubt Twitter is popular but is it really mainstream? For that matter is Facebook “mainstream” with 660 million users. What about LinkedIn, which has 100 million users?
They’re big numbers but I’m not convinced they’re mainstream because there are still large chunks of the population not using them or not aware of them. (Yes Virginia, there are people who don’t know what a Twitter or tweet is.)
E-mail is mainstream. The Web is mainstream. But Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or blogs?
One of the dangers of being within the eye of any hurricane such as social media is our view of the world can be torqued. It is easy for us to believe Twitter is mainstream because everyone around us is using and talking about Twitter.
I’m not suggesting Twitter isn’t popular and being embraced by new groups of users but I’m not sure it’s mainstream…at least, not yet.
I think when you have every mainstream media pushing and leveraging a platform like Twitter, it’s mainstream. Look at the mass media zeitgeist and lay that against how much drive there is to and from Twitter. It’s pretty staggering. I don’t see mainstream driven solely by #s but by media impressions in market and beyond.
Is Twitter “mainstream?” This depends on your definition of mainstream. Media attention doesn’t equal adoption or acceptance. Many of the senior business executives I work with do not use Twitter or see value in the time spent engaging on the platform.
Reporters love Twitter because they like the “new” in news so I think Twitter gets a bigger play in media because reporters and producers use the tool.