Think back to the good old days. Remember when you used Twitter as the bastion of refuge from the clutter of other channels? Time to think about that channel plan again. Twitter has more than 120 million users and adds at least 6 million new ones per month. Even with only one tenth of its users actively tweeting, Twitter has not only become the clutter, it has basically become full to capacity. Marketers who choose to use Twitter are faced with a double whammy of a high noise level and (so it seems to this user) a high instance of site unavailability. So what is a marketer to do? Do you find another channel that is less crowded, or soldier on with increasingly crowded and unusable channels, or what?

Twitter is just a channel rather than a means to an end. Marketers cannot live by Twitter alone. The same can be said for Foursquare and even Facebook. Just because one of your TV networks (take GSN, one of my guilty pleasures, for example) may experience some overloading, that does not mean that your TV set is broken or your satellite/cable service is down. Switch to another channel and see what you get.

Think long-term about changes in your market and how your customer behavior will evolve, and try to forecast where they are going next. See if the channel still fits.