New Term Everybody! The Ephemeral Graph

Robert Peck had his 15 minutes of Wall Street fame when he successfully forecast that Twitter’s share price would reach $50 after the IPO, which it did.

He’s a managing director at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, and one of his predictions for 2014 is that the emergence of the Ephemeral Graph will be a big feature in the social media technology landscape.

What’s that? Think of the emergence of Snapchat, and the market for a medium that does not store information but deletes it seconds after it has been created. The idea is the Ephemeral Graph could lead to a temporal economy that monetizes the concept of “disappearing content”. And if you think of the billions of dollars that Facebook and Google were considering investing in Snapchat, you can see the potential value this new model might have.

Is Twitter Part of the Ephemeral Graph?
No, because Twitter posts are stored. But given the amount of people who actually type, the attention the average tweet gets might be considered ephemeral. A new report by O’Reilly Radar shows that most Twitter accounts are pretty much ignored.

“The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.” Jon Bruner, O’Reilly Radar

For the most part, Twitter is a medium where people follow the conversation, rather than create it. And on top of that, it only takes 2,991 followers to crack the top one percent (by this metric the Jugnoo Twitter handle @Jugnoome is in the top 1% with 3,206 followers).

Even though Twitter is touted as a social media platform, it’s actual business plan is based on an “asymmetric follow model” – which is where Twitter’s 230 million users come in. They are following along alright, reading other people’s tweets – and consuming ads embedded within all the chatter.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/social-media/new-term-everybody-ephemeral-graph-0726775?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-term-everybody-ephemeral-graph