In the last week or two, a few studies have been released about the real Twitter numbers. According to Nielsen, Twitter’s retention rate is only 40%, or put another way, 60% of Twitter users fail to return the following month. Perhaps more damning, a recent study by Harvard Business Review found the 90/10 rule: that 90% of Twitter content is created by 10% of the users.

The blogosphere is abuzz about all of this. Maybe Twitter isn’t what it’s cracked up to be! Maybe Microsoft and Google should take the micro-blogging service off of its buy list!  Maybe Twittermania is over!

However, to the extent that Twitter is a mega-community, let’s take a look at communities in general and the research of Jakob Nielsen (not related) about Participation Inequality. I was introduced to his work by Jackie Huba of Church of the Customer, who has done significant research into “The 1% Rule.” Specifically, in a typical public community:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute periodically, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

The above numbers include some apples and oranges, but I’d say that Twitter is generally like most online communities. Most people aren’t as engaged as all of the hype says.

Communispace research has demonstrated that it’s nearly impossible to get much higher engagement unless your community is smaller. In our participation research 86% of people who logged-on to smaller, private communities actually participate whereas only 14% lurk. That’s important for what we do at Communispace because if people enter an insight community and just read or lurk, we fail. We need them to contribute content. This is not the case with other types of communities—such as Intuit’s customer-support community where lurking or only showing up occasionally is just fine, because part of the objective is to get people simply to read content.

The point? Let’s stop beating Twitter up for low participation. It seems to be following all of the rules that Nielsen, Huba, and others documented long ago. When the crowd is enormous and growing, most people are fairly quiet. In contrast, if the crowd is smaller, more intimacy leads to higher engagement. Just like in real life.

I’m interested in what you think.

13 Responses to “The Fuzzy Math of Twitter Engagement”

1. Anthony Power says:

   June 4, 2009 at 10:22 am

   Agree with the the ‘bigger they are, the harder it is to engage’ conclusion – that’s why fragmentation will occur. Plus given the rapid change in adoption rate – the hockey stick of users – it would be hard to imagine an equally large and sustainable increase in content or participation. The ‘hype-cycle’ also predicts this stuff — coming next will be the ‘trough of disillusionment’ where people realize it isn’t a silver bullet or panacea and they bail out. In fact, unlike the communities described above, there is no shared sense of purpose to Twitter – it can be used in lots of different ways for whatever we chose. Some may like it simply for sitting on the bank and watching it flow; others may be waist deep in the currents and eddies actively working the waters.
2. Thierry de Baillon says:

   June 4, 2009 at 11:00 am

   Diane,
   while, like Anthony, I agree on the “keep it small to be engaging” conclusion of your post, I don’t think you put the right demonstration.
   For me, Twitter is neither a community, nor a social network.
   My opinion is that Twitter is a protocol, just as http, tcp/ip, mail, IM, telephone… are protocols: a technological means to exchange data between different endpoints.
   In that case, it conveys community building, smallo or big networks, one-to-one conversations, and some more innovative or sophisticated channels. Tools are built on it to allow more structured conversation (Seesmic desktop is a perfect example), and there is quite a strong community of early adopters gathering here, but I definitely think that applying the rules or numbers which usually pertain to social networks is irrelevant.
3. Marie Connelly says:

   June 4, 2009 at 11:09 am

   I agree. I think for all the hype, Twitter its still pretty new to a lot of people and the lack of “shared purpose” that Anthony mentions can work against it.

   I think Twitter has tremendous value, but it’s sort of like an undergraduate education — it is as good as you make it. “Getting the most” out of Twitter, or even just enjoying it, often requires users to proactively seek out the people and communities that interest them. While that isn’t particularly hard to do, it’s also not as easy as it could be.

   Perhaps as the network grows, and more people can connect with their friends and colleagues right when they join, they’ll stick around long enough to meet new people.
4. Jackie Huba says:

   June 4, 2009 at 11:47 am

   Diane,
   That is fascinating that Twitter does seem to confirm to the 1% rule philosophy, that a small number of possible total contributors actually do contribute to the community. It would also be interesting to see a study on how many people just follow people and lurk on Twitter. While many may see this as not really participating, I bet those lurkers still get a lot out of the information that is shared.
5. Diane Hessan says:

   June 4, 2009 at 11:52 am

   Anthony, Thierry and Marie — Thanks for jumping in so quickly. You seem to all agree that Twitter is not really a community in the sense that there is no shared purpose — and even more, because it might just be more of a “protocol”. My personal experience is that it’s both. I DO use Twitter instead of email at times, but I also feel that it’s a type of community. Re the “small” issue, I predict this will become a huge factor in the next 12 months.
6. Diane Hessan says:

   June 4, 2009 at 11:55 am

   Agreed, Jackie. I learn a ton by lurking. What did you think of the male/female data? The HBR assumptions around women being the social networkers seem like myths, don’t they?
7. Jackie Huba says:

   June 4, 2009 at 12:19 pm

   The male/female data was surprising. Wondering if Twitter is not as tight a community as Facebook, or other niche communities where there is more interaction and so more women.
8. Tom Ewing says:

   June 4, 2009 at 4:28 pm

   Not a huge surprise that Twitter usage has that kind of distribution (since most other things online do!). But anyone using it as a stick to beat the tool with is somewhat misguided: anyone’s contacts on Twitter, after all, make up a tiny fraction of the “Twitterverse”, so what happens at an aggregate level is pretty much irrelevant to the user experience. What’s important is how participatory your own follows and followers are.

   (This is different to a community experience, where the default mode is usually publishing to the whole community, so participation inequality is a much more “tangible” effect.)

   Actually, the 90/10 thing probably ENHANCES the Twitter experience. If you use it much, you’re almost certainly in the 10% producing 90% of the content, which means in effect that the Twitter universe is 10 times SMALLER than you imagined it was! ;)

   Writing this it’s just struck me that something Twitter does really well is give the impression of a vast and bustling world of users out there (via trending topics, etc.) which conceals the fact that the world you actually experience is relatively tiny, and you’re uncannily important in it. It’s a reverse Total Perspective Vortex, if you live!
9. Diane Hessan says:

   June 4, 2009 at 5:42 pm

   A really insightful post, Tom. My daughters both went to a large high school, and they learned that the secret was to “make the place small” by finding the groups they wanted to be part of. That strategy is also important for maximizing what you get out of the so-called mega-communities.
10. Mark Schlack says:

    June 8, 2009 at 9:32 am

    Thiery’s comment points out the blurry and evolving nature of Twitter. They have a Miller Lite issue: is it an easy way to subscribe to worthwhile information uses, or is it a way to find like-minded people and exchange info with them? The first option puts Twitter as one of the players looking to be the successor to the only modestly succesful RSS. The second seems destined from the start to only describe a fraction of the membership, as some of the first group has no interest in participating, only in consuming.
    The appeanrance of Oprah on Twitter highlights this dichotomy, IMO. No one seriously believes they’re going to be a peer of Oprah.
    There are, however, many small communities on Twitter, both in the form of central individuals with manageable followings and accounts created by real-word groups who use it as an adjunct to actual community.
    I’d like to say you have to pick a lane, but I’m not sure that’s true. Until it is superceeded by something else, I suspect Twitter will not be a unitary entity.
11. Dave Savage says:

    June 9, 2009 at 8:55 am

    It doesn’t surprise me that 90% of content is created by 10% of its users. My theory is that this 10% are also the same people who are likely to blog, post updates on Facebook, write reviews on amazon, and post articles on epinions.com. Call them early adopters, influencers, extroverts, or expressionists. We know them well and see them in our Communispace communities.

    The magic is tapping into that “other 90%”, those people who are much more likely to lurk and are reluctant to express their opinions. These are the people we think about every day as online facilitators. It’s the college kid skipping between espn and ebaumsworld or the executive who dictates email to his assistant. We know people like to be heard and they like to know that can make a difference.

    I recall investing several email exchanges with a grandma from Woodward, Oklahoma convincing the online rookie that her voice mattered to my client (a large computer manufacturer). She had never done much more than send email and was very skeptical at first. To my surprise, she went on to be one of the most articulate and passionate members I had every experienced in any one of our communities.

    Cheers to that other 90%!
12. Diane Hessan says:

    June 9, 2009 at 10:09 pm

    Hey Mark — Thanks for the commentary. Wouldn’t you love to be in the board room when they discuss Twitter’s future? Your post highlights what must be one of the central issues. Can it be everything? Not.
13. J. Michael Dean says:

    June 11, 2009 at 8:36 pm

    Everyone’s thought provoking opinions mirror my experiences with Twitter. Who is out there and why are they there? I have experimented with everything from personal tweets to specific questions thrown into the “tweeterverse”, seeking a response. My experiences are determining my value obtained and at the same time altering my reasons for using this media. My conclusion is with the economy today, nothing should be overlooked or dismissed as a passing trend.