Worldwide Twitter traffic doubled on US Presidential election night showing the world its true potential and identity

Twitter recorded a 100% spike in traffic over the US election night, the first positive news Twitter has received in a year that has seen them fail to secure a serious buyer and plan to lay off 300 workers.

However, the news doesn’t come as much of a surprise to us, in fact, it confirms our shared assessment of what the microblogging platform truly is: a real-time (live) political, news and current affairs network which have absolutely nothing to do with social interaction, Twitter is a hard-hitting commentary tool perfect for its often confused social networking model.

Thanks to Twitter, worldwide web traffic went down up to 15% as people took to Twitter to get real-time updates of the hotly contested US Presidential elections which saw Presidential candidate, now President Elect Donald Trump, win in a resounding victory much to the shock of the Democrat Party and minorities in America. 

Facebook also benefitted from all the hype recording a 30% spike in traffic worldwide but the runaway winner remains Twitter which saw traffic double overnight and continues to record steady high traffic numbers as people again look to Twitter to digest more news of the shocking results.

For comparison sake, Netflix which is America’s largest consumer of internet traffic went down significantly over the US election as people moved away from entertainment to politics (which is equally entertaining at times) to get informed of what was happening in their country.

If there was ever a time Twitter should sit down and realize its true identity it’s now. In the background, the company has replaced its COO and on the hunt for a CFO as they look to bounce back from years of poor financial performance and customer churn out with a solid turnaround strategy that will see them back competing with other social networks platforms.

To us, Twitter is not a social network for “social communication”, it’s a political, business and current affairs network that allows users to gain real-time information and insights from global leaders in politics, business, finance human rights to name but a few.

Twitter’s real-time feed allows users to track real-time events happening around the world, these can include elections, demonstrations, news and lately sports events. We have seen Twitter partner with American sports franchise NFL to broadcast games allowing a direct Twitter feed for fan commentary and we have also seen Tweets being used to interact with viewers on live tv shows.

The space and time in between the live events are what Twitter seems to be trying too hard to accommodate for, but if your use has been established by your own subscribers why continue to fight against it?

It has been difficult for Twitter to offer a social platform as it is not entirely designed for it, they tried to incorporate hashtags to get people tuned into the same conversations but as experience has shown these often develop into political and protest slogans, a reflection of what Twitter is to its users. Twitter is slowly becoming the world preferred news network as it shows all sides of a story.