Growing pains…

growing pains are never easy...

So, twitter is growing up. And Facebook is preparing to fight back…

We had the ‘first love’ moment, when Facebook courted Twitter. They danced round each other, the future looked rosy. Then, they tweeted off their separate ways…

We had the onset of puberty when charging business users was floated. It went down very badly…

Immediate statements to the contrary were hastily issued. On top of this, Facebook has decided its time to fight back. It doesn’t like twitter cannibalising what it sees as its web traffic. So a more tweet like ‘real time’ changes are expected to be rolled out across facebook shortly…

And now, the growing pains really kick in. Desparate to monetise the site and find a model that works for them, Twitter plod on. However, some good news came their way today.

Omniture have rather handily announced it has added a feature to its web analytics product that allows marketers to measure brand activity on twitter.

This feature will allow marketers to take advantage real-time, making it possible to send emails or SMS messages to mobile devices based on pre-determined criteria (e.g. a massive spike in brand related terms).

Great in moments of PR crisis. This will no doubt split opionion of the tweeters, but for now, great news for marketers…

Iain Morrison is a senior marketer in the British Tourism Industry. And can be found tweeting if you go a hunting for @igmorrison