5 billion tweets — and counting

According to Gigatweet, the 5 billionth tweet was delivered sometime today (maybe yesterday – we’re at 5,005,611,937 as I type). That’s a lot of people saying a lot of things, 140 characters at a time.

To put this in context, the one billionth tweet was delivered in November 2008; traffic since then has grown almost exponentially. How can a company’s message possibly stand out in that flood? What can a marketer do to attract attention and hold it? Not sure anyone has the answer yet since the medium is evolving so quickly — but it does seem that we will require more sophisticated measures than numbers of followers or friends to see what works. Since it’s nearly impossible to tie a tweet to a sale, many people are looking at numbers of followers (or web page views or the like) to gauge whether a marketing campaign is successful. I would argue that pure “eyeballs” don’t guarantee that a message is getting through or even that its been read.

Lots of ideas, no answers. But 5 billion. Wow.

Do you tweet? How are you measuring to see if your message is getting through?