FarmVille was the biggest of all emerging web technologies in 2009 partly due to the fact that the rise of FarmVille is the death of Twitter. It is also the reason that I haven't updated my blog in 15 months. There literally were no other emerging web technologies. Don't question me on this. I'm an expert and its the name of my blog.

Why exactly is FarmVille better for business than Twitter? I'll sum it up for you... Anyone can have a twitter account and update their status easily while investing very little time or attention. But is that really the message you want to send to your customers - that you will be investing little time or attention into THEIR NEEDS? How dumb of you!

FarmVille, on the other hand, requires lots of time and resources to be successful. It mirrors real life business. If a potential customer notices that you have a well maintained farm, they will be more likely to become your FarmVille neighbor. Mirroring that, they will become a valuable customer in real life and probably give you lots and lots of money. You can even send your existing customers gifts through FarmVille - something they can actually use - rather than spamming them left and right with yet another worthless retweeted self-promoting Twitter update that is more than likely putting you on their ignore list. Besides, nothing says warm lead like finding a lost cow.

There is an article on CNN today asking if twitter has peaked. FTA: "They show the site peaked with about 21.2 million visitors in July 2009 and dipped to 19.9 million in December. By contrast, during the same period Facebook grew from about 250 million users to more than 350 million." Don't forget that Farmville by itself is now bigger than Twitter anyway.

Don't believe that Twitter is dying? How many real friends do you have on Twitter? As in friends who aren't self-promoting or retweeting someone else's self-promotion in the hope that that self-promotion retweet will garner them more retweeting self-promoting followers who will do nothing more than fill your feed with retweeted self-promotion? My guess is 4. You would only have 4 friends. And you went to high school with them 10 years ago. And you really don't care what their cat is up to.

My advice? Stop tweeting. Completely. Don't be lazy. Don't be crazy. Drop the bird and buy a herd (of sheep on FarmVille). BTW, I'm still investigating ways of integrating FarmVille into our very own Marketpath CMS... I'll keep you updated on how that goes.

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Comments (3)

Colin Clark wrote
Dude, honestly I think you're missing the big picture here. Everyone already knows that Farmville is bigger and better for business than twitter. The inside story is that Mafia Wars have almost completely overtaken blogs for most people online. It's true... look it up.
Posted Jan 26 2010 2:28 PM

Twitter Freak wrote
wow, you are totally unenlightened and highly cynical - good luck with that
Posted Feb 21 2010 5:06 PM

finch wrote
You don't seem to 'get' Twitter at all. Twitter is about communication and news, not just selling stuff. True, a lot of people have tried to use it for marketing - that was the peak last July - now a lot of them have given up and gone away, leaving behind the people who want to use Twitter for more pertinent stuff, such as breaking news or finding like-minded people to talk to, share stuff with and work with. It sounds as though you are talking about Twitter purely as a marketing site, well obviously it's not just that. But if you do want to use Twitter for marketing, you have to understand it well and be clever about how you use it. I take it that you didn't do well on Twitter then? How many businesses have the time and resources to set up and run a really effective account on FarmVille? If other users are half way intelligent they'll think "if this seller is spending so much time on FarmVille then either they're not doing very well and have time to kill, or they're doing very well - i.e. they're charging their customers too much"
Posted Mar 9 2010 9:43 AM

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Emerging Web Technologies

FarmVille vs. Twitter Smackdown (Farmville FTW)