Is Twitter becoming less important?

Hardly.

Twitter has been in and out of the news over the last couple months. Most of the coverage and commentary negative.

Twitter has not realized its potential. Twitter has not experienced the success of Facebook. Twitter needs to refine its business model. Twitter needs to develop products. Twitter needs to replace its CEO, Dick Costolo – which it did.

You get it, a lot of piling on. One Harvard Professor and former corporate executive called Twitter the Blackberry of social media.

This type of coverage raises questions in lawyers and business professionals minds as to whether Twitter remains important. Should I continue to use Twitter? Should I start using it? How so?

I am getting these questions.

For the 99.999999% of the world who are not Twitter shareholders, Twitter is more important than ever.

More people are using Twitter than ever. Especially those looking to keep up abreast of niche information, such as the media, bloggers, and business leaders.

Don’t get wigged out that Twitter doesn’t serve as a social network for you.

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone told the Telegraph’s Sophie Curtis @scurtsy that he never saw Twitter as a social network.

I always felt it was more of the world’s news feed. Especially now that they have Periscope [an app which allows live streaming of video]. If something’s going on, there’s going to be 53 angles from Periscope, and a stream of tweets – it’s like a Bloomberg terminal for the world.

When I was at Twitter I always said over and over that it doesn’t matter how many people have downloaded or registered. It only matters what they’re doing on the network. The goal ideally is to get to hundreds of millions of happy people, then you have a business.

Exactly. As a I told one Texas lawyer this last week, look at Twitter as the AP, UPI, Reuters, Bloomberg. Get detailed news and information from those in the know, from those on the scene and on niches like never before.

If you want to take it a step further, get your news on this tele-type. Share your own commentary (blog posts) and niche news/information that you read. You’ll establish yourself as an intelligence agent in a niche.

Twitter is no sooner going away than the moon. It’s where the world turns for news, sports info and current affairs. In the case of breaking news anywhere in the world, you can pick up reports, pictures and videos from people on the site.

Twitter has more than 500 million users, of which more than 302 million are active users. The service has handled upwards of 1.6 billion searches a day.

For those of you who use Twitter regularly, you’ll also find the social component in Twitter. One Dallas lawyer told me last week he began representing a company after the CEO and he got to know each other via Twitter exchanges about recreational activities.

Twitter is not going away. Twitter is one of the social media you should know and master.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Jason Mrachina