🧠 Thoughts & Readings
Recently, Twitter has seen a major rise of popularity in German speaking countries. While the platform already became popular in the U.S. and most other European countries around 2013, it looks like Germany, Austria and Switzerland are finally showing up at the Twitter party venue.
Interestingly, that hasn’t been the case for other platforms , when it comes to Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat German speakers have been polite party guests and showed up more or less on time. The peaks for the European countries (at least the ones included in this graph) and the U.S. are always within a 2 years timeframe.
Chances are of course that Google search interest is not a good proxy for user growth. Maybe people just all of a sudden got really interested in reading things about Twitter but still don’t want to use it. However, recently reported data on Germany shows a 30% growth in Twitter users in Q4 2020 alone [2] (the largest increase of all markets worldwide), so it seems the proxy variable is not too bad after all.
But why did the Germans, the Swiss and the Austrians not start tweeting earlier? And what makes them flock to Twitter now?
Forbes and The Economist published a few articles on Germany & Twitter a few years back (I guess Austria and Switzerland are just too small as anyone would have cared about their non existing interest in Twitter). This is what they suggested ranked by my personal feeling of how likely they are to be true (highest to lowest):
Trust in traditional media is comparatively high in Germany. [2]
Percentage of trust in news is between 40% and 46% in German speaking countries, while the U.S. has around 29% and France 23%. [3] Judging from this it seems quite plausible that the need for alternative sources of information has been lower in GER, AT and CHE, making a comparatively(!) fact-based social media platform less of a necessity. Also, taking into account that Germany’s go-to virologist Christian Drosten has seen the most Twitter follower growth in the German hemisphere in 2020, it might be that (1) the urge for a higher variety in information sources due to the pandemic and (2) more time spent online, caused the surge in late 2020.Germans are traumatized by communist East Germany and don’t use twitter because of their resulting preoccupation with privacy. [4]
What about Switzerland then? And why do Germans use Facebook? There is probably a higher concern about privacy issues in Germany/Switzerland/Austrian than in many other countries, but I think this is more due to general national culture than to the Stasi.SME’s in Germany rely more on personal relationships for making business and less on Social Media. [5]
Probably true to some extent, but doesn’t really explain the popularity of other Social Media. Also, despite Twitter definitely being a business motor as well, this doesn’t explain why individuals are not on Twitter.German language makes tweeting hard. [4]
Probably harder than in English but if the Dutch can manage to tweet in Dutch why shouldn’t we be able to tweet in German? And what happened in 2020 that German speakers are suddenly able to condense their thoughts into 140 signs?
All in all, I am still not 100% satisfied with these explanations. Would be interested to hear if anyone has some other ideas/thoughts.
Oh and if you are on Twitter, I have an account since December - would love to connect.
🤓 Learnings
Currently learning about: Effective Altruism - Ideals & Criticism 🤝
The most effective charities are estimated to be over 100 times more effective than the worst performing ones.
It’s obviously quite hard to tell how effective a charity truly is, but current estimates based on case-studies and expert interviews estimate that some charities are more than 100 times more effective than others. This ultimately boils down to the fact, that the decision which charities to donate to over a lifetime can make a difference of hundreds of lives save/not saved. [6]
✨ Random
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[1] The Economist (2017): Why Europeans are less eager consumers of online ranting than Americans
[2] Hootsuit: Twitter Stats All Marketers Need to Know in 2021.
[3] Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020
[4] Forbes (2014): What Germany Can Teach The Rest Of Europe About Twitter
[5] The Economist (2013): Why do Germans shun Twitter?
[6] Ord, Toby (2013): The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health