Lies, Damned Lies and Twitter Usage Statistics

Twitter users come in two colours according to recent reports: over-​​sharing or silent. Last week, audience research company Nielsen released figures sug­gesting an enormous polarity between active and inactive members in the UK. The graph shows that 79% of time spent on the site comes from just 7% of its members:

Only poor MySpace has a greater pro­por­tion of slackers, while Facebook seems like a hive of communal activity in com­par­ison, with a whopping half of the users there accounting for nearly all the time spent on the site. (sarcasm not intended, but may be enjoyed nonetheless).

[Nielsen invokes the ‘Pareto Principle’: the 80:20 ‘rule’ that’s so fre­quently men­tioned nowadays. That 80% of the content/​wealth/​product/​whatever is produced by 20% of the populace. Except, of course, it isn’t a rule. And if it was, it doesn’t apply here. On Twitter, it would actually be a 79:7 rule, which is totally dif­ferent. And Facebook would have similar figure, which it doesn’t. And there wouldn’t have been a theatre group called 7:84, since 7% of Scotland’s pop­u­la­tion own 84% of the wealth.

In actual fact, the sci­entific term for this dis­tri­bu­tion is a coin­cid­ence.]

Moving on, the Times Technology Blog reports today on some research pub­lished at the end of January by RJMetrics. Surveying 50,000 users, the report found that most members of Twitter simply do not tweet. Here, around 80% of users have pub­lished fewer than ten updates since opening their account.

The issue is not, as you might have imagined, aban­doned older accounts, but rather new users who simply never get started. Over the last six months, the like­li­hood of a new member tweeting in their second month on the site has declined to just 17%. The next graph shows your like­li­hood of tweeting this month against the date that you joined:

The network – from some per­spect­ives – is also becoming less social, according to this research: “the average Twitter user has 27 fol­lowers, down from 42 fol­lowers in August 2009”. The new users aren’t tweeting and aren’t con­necting either (the two help to explain each other, of course). Around 80% of Twitter members have fewer than eleven fol­lowers, with the mega-​​stars inflating the average figure very considerably.

You might take this as a sign of Twitter’s figures being over-​​inflated, or of it being a fad of which people have already grown tired. The Times blog sees the figures as evidence that the site is vastly over-​​hyped and will soon dis­ap­pear from the head­lines, backing this up with its own ‘original’ reporting:

In an unscientific survey of my friends and business contacts here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter, I found that no one not using Twitter felt they were out of the loop. Only those who needed to get a message out there, usually for company reasons, were using it.

Even those in Tech PR are finding it nowhere near as useful as it once was. One told me: “We launched a social media platform for our client but after a few days, once the the spammers had cottoned on to us, it was pretty much a waste of time.”

I’d suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why newer users aren’t fol­lowing or tweeting as much as older users, and neither of them are that Twitter is a fad or a failure. First, if you join Twitter now, it’s all rather odd and intim­id­ating. Every other user is seem­ingly more popular and inter­esting than you are. There are no instruc­tions about what to do – why would anyone be inter­ested in what I’m doing right now? Even I’m not inter­ested in that. Then a bunch of mar­keting bots will start fol­lowing you. The people you know who are already on Twitter are fol­lowing too many people already and, as nice as you are, don’t want more on their list. 

Second, and more import­antly, there’s more than one Twitter. Here are four:

• there’s the one where geeks swap links and chat;
• there’s the one where people make thinly veiled boasts about their pro­fes­sional success;
• there’s the one where mar­keters and pub­lishers spurt content blips at people;
• there’s the one where you read celebrities’ micro-​​blogs.

And there’s plenty of other use cases as well, and many people will probably fall into more than one category. In each case, the criteria for the site deliv­ering a useful exper­i­ence to its members is slightly dif­ferent. If I joined Twitter because I am a devoted fan of Lindsay Lohan, then it’s more than likely that I am fol­lowing one person, am followed by nobody and am saying nothing. It’s quite possible that I don’t even open my own account, pre­fer­ring to bookmark Linday’s page like my other websites. I’m not a bad user or behind the curve: I’m using the site my way to achieve my aims. Twitter is rep­res­ented in the press as a celebrity micro-​​blog site. There is a book about it. No, wait, there’s two. If the site is rep­res­ented as an online com­panion to Hello magazine and reality TV shows, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a lot of people join in order to consume celebrity life­style information.

I think that this is why the usage figures are so dif­ferent for Twitter and Facebook. Facebook tells you what to do on the site and then gives you multiple ways to do it. Twitter is a blank canvas in com­par­ison: the way you use can be totally dif­ferent to the way everyone else uses it. To many people, that’s an invit­a­tion to their cre­ativity or to their egos; to others it’s an invit­a­tion to spend their time on a more obvi­ously useful site.

It also shows us how mean­ing­less averages and per-​​user figures are in social media. It makes abso­lutely no sense what­so­ever to lump the Lohan fan in with the geek early adopters. It is a dif­ferent site with dif­ferent purposes.

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Possibly related:

• Lies, Damned Lies and Weblog Statistics
• The Twitter Business
• All of a Twitter