A recent survey by an analytics company has revealed that Twitter, one of the leading stars in mobile website accesibility and technology may not be as entrenched in the mobile web as we might expect. When asked about which brands they want to see on their mobile phones, respondents to this research placed the microblogging service as low as 16th, behind Weather.Com and even the dying dinosaur Myspace.
But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?
Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought
This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.
The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.
Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!