29
2009
Twitter Revisited – in More than 140 Characters
A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter’s staying power versus competition from Facebook.
I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook’s astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).
Facebook’s dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter’s domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter’s decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.
At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!
I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter’s decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.
That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.
Hi Bill,
Your data is always a tonic – thanks for sharing this and your earlier post, which includes the key caveat: “the above chart indicates visits to Twitter’s website, and does not include application and mobile traffic.”
The Pew Internet Project’s surveys also find that social network sites like Facebook still dominate the communications picture (about half of internet users are on a SNS vs 1 in 5 who are on Twitter). The on-the-go updates were really striking to me in our most recent survey – the more wireless devices someone owns, the more likely they are to tweet, for example.
We survey researchers have our challenges (low response rates, the expense of cell phone samples…) but now I’m worried about how Hitwise and other traffic measurement firms will adapt to the ever-growing mobile market. Have you addressed that in a separate post? I’d love to hear more since I count on your data to balance our own.
One of the hypothesis I have regarding the drop in traffic to twitter is the the number of applications that are enabling you to use twitter without logging into twitter. What might be interesting to see is number of tweets over period of time. For me, I use 3rd party sites to follow, tweet, retweet and hardly log into twitter.
-rahul @thedeshmukhs
Facebook vs. Twitter IV.
Hitwise: There is a competitive threat that Twitter (0.14%) may pose to a 6.10% Facebook reach (USA); http://j.mp/40Q0nX…
Some data on users coming to Twitter via the API is publicly available, though not comprehensive. Shouldn’t you at least mention it?
If it doesnt count application traffic it is meaningless. Most people get on tweetdeck or something similar.
I’d also like to see trends of number of Tweets. Another stat that might be interesting is the rate of unfollowing. For example, early on I Tweeted a lot and followed a lot of people. But as I burned out and realized minimal return on time spent on Twitter, I started Tweeting less and unfollowing people who were “junking up” my stream. This of course naturally shrunk my usage, and therefore I imagine those two trends would provide some indication of usage for others as well.
While there’s clearly a difference in scale between the two sites, comparing visits to the website isn’t an accurate way of measuring total Twitter use (as I’m sure you’re aware).
This report suggests a large percentage of users do their tweeting via apps other than twitter.com http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/
From the data presented by Hitwise, the unknown is whether the percentage of people using apps is increasing to take up the slack in website dropoff. I have no evidence to suggest one way or the other…
Out of all the people I know using Twitter, not one of them uses the Twitter web site to post tweets.
And when I look at the people I am following, it shows the client they used – maybe one in twenty are posting from Twitter. Most are posting from mobile clients or desktop software.
(Of course that’s not forgetting that you can post to Facebook from third party software and mobile devices).
Until this usage is measured any data is suspect at best.
Facebook appears to be here to stay, I can’t say the same about Twitter.