Is Twitter in Danger?

I wrote a previous post about the present-state of twitter and its decreasing user growth.  While its growth is diminishing, I still do not see the extinction of twitter any time soon.  And yet again, I found an article that suggests impending doom for the future of the social network.

eMarketer performed research, which revealed that Twitter's growth has significantly slowed down and will continue to lessen over the next couple of years.  The article presents a graph that shows the significance of this decrease in growth... or what appears to look significant.

However, I think that Twitter's growth tapering off is quite natural with a forum as large as twitter, who's popularity struck most of the population at once.  Ever heard of the point of diminishing returns? Well, twitter has definitely reached it.

Of course at its peak, individuals everywhere were creating accounts and becoming users, but there are just so many people that the twitter world can realistically reach.  At some point, its growth must stabilize and become relatively stable.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for a company like twitter to grow at the same pace that it grew when it was at its upmost popularity.  Once everyone who is active in the social media world has accounts, who else can you appeal to? And this may be twitter's most daunting task.

From my personal relationships and peers, I have realized that those who don't already have twitter accounts are firm in their anti-twitter ways.  And most of the people who are strong advocates of and strongly active in the twitter world, have been in the twitter world for quite some time now.

Non-users believe that since they don't already have an account by now, there's no sense in making one and having to learn how to operate the platform. Why should they when everybody else is already ahead of them?

But in reality, twitter is actually a pretty simple and user-friendly platform, and I think Twitter should work harder to promote themselves to potential users, rather than focusing on current ones.  

Also, another insight that twitter may gain from the graph and statistics is that if social media users aren't directing their attention towards twitter, they are directing it somewhere else.  Where are they going? 

My guess is to photo-friendly social media applications like Instagram.  Its sad to say, but maybe the attention-spans of some people aren't large enough to handle the 140 character tweets.  Photos are virtually effortless to view and hey, they're still worth a thousand worlds.

So, overall, one may discover a few things about the study of Twitter's decreasing growth, but they will not find that twitter will be moving onto the endangered species list anytime soon.  Perhaps to prove such a prediction, a study should be conducted about current twitter activity rather than user growth.

As an avid Twitter lover, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.