I’m beginning to wonder about how big of a community can be meaningfully maintained online and how this affects news organizations. For example, many early Twitter adopters such as myself report that their rate of responses, retweets and click-thrus have declined over time.
I suspect this may have less to do with any change in behavior on our parts or that of our followers and more to do with the fact that the Twitter universe is now so large. Already overflowing streams are flooding. The likelihood that even your most interested followers will even see a tweet is ever lower.
In order to develop engaged and loyal communities on social media, news organizations are going to have to work harder and smarter and try to find solutions to Shirky’s “filter failure” problem.