Anyone who is active in this space will know that the last few days has seen a raft of research out about Twitter, most of it taking aim at the Twitter hype. To sum up:
Men only follow other men...or do they?
First of all we have the Harvard Business School study of 'men follow men and nobody tweets.'
According to the survey, "We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman."
Those misogynistic nerds! Or are they?
From personal experience I've seen a lot of spammers dress up their accounts with 'Jessica889' or something like that, stick a picture of a half dressed model on it, and then post a link with 'how to earn $10,000 in a month.'
Just like with Second Life (which Twitter has been compared to in terms of hype), a woman's picture on the account doesn't always mean that is who is tweeting.
Twitter for personal broadcasts....or link sharing?
Harvard also discovered that only 10% of users are responsible for 90% of tweets.
In other words Twitter is occupied by a select few who use it to blast out their pearls of wisdom to whoever happens to be listening. Well yes, Twitter is a personal broadcasting system for some....or you could take a different interpretation and say it's a sharing system.
For sure you can't really have any kind of great conversation in 140 characters, but I personally see it as a conversation or information sharing starter. By and large I use it to post links - whatever I happen to be reading that I find useful I tweet out. The value I get back is from people who do the same. Thanks to Twitter I discover new stuff that I wouldn't ordinarily.
According to the BBC, The Harvard team found that half of tweeple update their page less than once every 74 days, and most only ever Tweet once in a lifetime (i.e. visit once, never to return).
Recently I set out three reasons why Twitter isn't like Second Life - one being that Nielsen's reported churn rate of 60% was nowhere near as bad as Second Life's 85%. However if the Harvard figures are to be believed, then Twitter is indeed losing visitors at a similar rate.
The end of the hype cycle?
Then we have Compete's data of, after months of run away growth, Twitter's user numbers rose by only 1.47% in May. However at the same time, Comscore says that Twitter had 32 million global visitors in April up from 19 million in March.
Now Compete looked at May and Comscore was a month behind, but you would think there is no good reason to finally sound the Twitter death knell for a service that almost doubled in size over the Spring.
Perhaps not surprisingly from what I've seen, the Compete figures are getting a lot more pick-up. One similarity that does exist between Second Life and Twitter is the 'see, I told you so!' crowd waiting for its bubble to burst.
Twitter - not mass market, but more of an early warning system?
Ultimately I'd argue that the value of Twitter is not being able to reach hundreds of millions of people anyway. Twitter-specific ad agencies trying to get with the gold rush are by and large wasting their time, it is not a mass consumer vehicle.
But at the same time, it doesn't matter if there are only a few million active Twitter users worldwide, the fact is they are disproportionately geared towards the media and bloggers: People who see something on Twitter and then write about it to a wider audience. Online gatekeepers.
For brands, it's kind of an early warning system. You can see what's being talked about in real time and react to it as appropriate before it leaves the micro-blogging platform.
And a final point on the numbers. So only 10% are really active. As Dave Rosenberg said on CNET, 95% of blogs are 'ghost blogs', and yet you don't dismiss blogs out of hand.
Related articles by Zemanta- Today, We Think Twitter Is Dead (for Now) (gigaom.com)
- Twitter and blogs: Post once and bail out (news.cnet.com)
- Twitter hype punctured by study (news.bbc.co.uk)
- Augmented Reality Is the New Second Life (futurelab.net)
- Twitter is a broadcast medium - "10% of users generate 90% of content" (allaboutsymbian.com)
- Why Twitter isn't like Second Life (thisisherd.com)
- Median of tweets per user is - uh - rather low (dvorak.org)
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