Brand Warfare

Twitter and the French market: a love story?

Quick overview

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that allows its users to send "tweets". Those tweets are text-based post limited to 140 characters. If we had to sum up, let’s say that tweets are online SMS.

The company was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011. The users are generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.
(Source : http://blog.twitter.com/2011/08/your-world-more-connected.html)

In France Twitter started around the end of 2007. Although it started pretty slow, it is the website that has known the biggest growth at the beginning of 2009.
(1382% in February – Source Nielsen : http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success/)

But even tough 80% of the French internet users know Twitter, only 7% have an account, which makes about 2.4 million users out of 37.54 million French internet users. (Source Mediametrie in Journal du net - http://www.journaldunet.com/ebusiness/le-net/nombre-internautes-france.shtml)

In March 2011, another study from Semiocast evaluates the number of French Twitter account to 2.4 million. This total also includes non-active accounts.




Compare to the 27 million of French Facebook users, Twitter is falling far behind. Even Google+ which only opened at the end of June has about 3 million users.
(Source : http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/audience-google-passe-devant-twitter-en-france-39765102.htm)


3 reasons for the limited audience in France

1) Twitter has a specific language

Although how it works is as simple as it can get, because the user only has to type in what is happening to him at any point in his day. It gets more complicated.
To use it, you’ll need to understand what “@...”, “CC”, “Twitpic”, “URL Shortener”, “#FF” and interactions are working. When you take the time to look it up, it is not that complicated, but it is still a barrier for some users.

2) Building a community is time-consuming.

To build a community in Facebook is simple. You just need to search and add “friends” and they will be able to see your post on their wall. It is mostly casual and does not need to be about a specific topic. You can be added regardless of the number of friends you have. Usually you will be in contact with person that you know In Real Life.
On Twitter it is quite the opposite. You need to have followers to be considered as “influent” and to be followed. People are mostly basing their judgment for who they follow on the number of people already following them… Therefore it is hard to start on it when you create an account with zero followers. It will be very time-consuming for the user to build a community and if you do not share a particular interest you will feel alone at first on the media…

3) Twitter is fast, too fast …

Does anyone have the time to spend its whole day on the Internet ? I do not think so. Facebook’s newsfeed allows people to check out very quickly what their friends have been up to during a day. With Twitter, there is no way to check out what happened during the whole day from the moment you start following more than a few accounts…



So yes, Twitter has some advantages (up to date information, professional contact, fan-follow, company visibility etc.), but the users have to put effort in the social network and for this reason only a few people will keep following their account after 10 tweets.