SWOT Analysis of Twitter

Strengths

• Gets tons of publicity.
• Is a thing on its own (almost no competition in microblogging).
• It is simple but powerful.
• It is 100% social in an all-social web.
• It is free.
• Has a strong brand name already.
• Created the bluebird craze.
• Provides authentication for other applications (OAuth).
• Has developers creating hundreds of applications around its API.
• It’s definitely not evil (yet).
• Businesses like it a lot.
• It is real-time.
• Has no ads.
• It is searchable.
• It is totally RSS-enabled.
• It is the ultimate link discovering and sharing tool.

Weaknesses

• Needs more horsepower. It is down quite often.
• The API calls are limited. Hurts App growth.
• Unequal distribution of tweets. 90% of tweets are coming from the top 10% of the users.
• Has low retention rate. Only 40%.*

Opportunities

• It can become a dominant search engine.
• It is becoming the biggest social media marketing tool.
• Develop a Twitter Connect tool to make every site social.
• It may acquire some of the desktop clients or the url shortening services.
• It may become the dominant way for businesses to communicate with their customers.

Threats

• It got too much publicity in a short time. May get burned out.
• It is getting dangerously spammy.
• Has no solid revenue model.
• May have trouble with unauthorized accounts on behalf of celebrities.
• Paid twitter streams may hurt the brand image.
• Facebook may get even more twitty and compete face-to-face with Twitter in microblogging sphere.
• Friendfeed and identi.ca may grow and steal market share.
• Acquisition by a bigger player (Google) may disappoint early adopters and loyal users.