Twitter has been one of the biggest SEO mines of 2009, however there are signs that the global appeal of Twitter in on the wane. Many business now are thinking again about the value of twitter in reaching their target audience. In a recent article by Online Commentator Chris Crumb, the value of twitter has been looked at. In the article, he says that his position on twitter has softened slightly from an essential ingredient to marketing, down to a means tested component. That is to say, if your company does not have a clear goal and strategy for using twitter, then the benefits are limited. Comments on this article are mostly 'twitter is an expensive use of time, and not suitable for all'.

From the consumers perspective, the problem with twitter is that there are too many companies hawking their goods on it. The same thing happened to myspace, and there are signs of it happening to the more popular facebook too.

SEO marketers face a double edged sword when using social networks. If you ignore the latest web 2.0 trends, then you are in danger of being left behind, but if you do too much on them, then you are in danger of alienating your market. It is the responsibility of the site owners to ration the amount of commercial marketing that goes on in their networks and to maintain the quality of the network. Personally, I would like to see a social network like facebook allow for two separate accounts types - a personal account and a business account. You can then set greater restrictions on business accounts, and if you find people are using personal accounts to promote businesses, then you can regrade their accounts to business ones.

I think in the case of twitter, it is going to be too little too late, and unless they do something drastic, they will find that the real people who use the network will dry up, and all that will be left are millions of tweets from automated bots (which are going to be much easier to set up using the firehose API) that flood the system with spam and unsolicited marketing posts.