by Rob Paterson
December 24, 2008 at 4:07 pm
· Filed under Hubspot, Twitter
In 2008 Twitter came of age and has become a mainstream tool that is going to be very important in news, marketing and simply keeping friends attached. The Presidential Election, Mumbai and even fun things such as #snowmageddon have shown many the value.
Hubspot have released a very useful set of stats for where the users are with Twitter now. The full report is here on PDF and here is their web summary in full.
You can also read the TechCrunch article – State of the Twittershpere for more info.
Stowe Boyd thinks that you have to look more deeply into the numbers than this.
I have suggested for a longtime that to ‘get’ Twitter you need to follow 100 people at least, for several weeks. This cursory recitation of stats suggests that there are thousands of users out there happily communing with a handful of friends. I don’t buy it. I bet most of those accounts with small use, small links, and small time online represent a fringe of uninvolved people who aren’t getting much value from the service, if they login in at all. The sweet spot is far north of the center of some bell curve, I believe.
The real analysis of meaningful trands will have to wait, but here’s some cross tabs that would be interesting:
- What’s the distribution of perceived value? Does more use translate into higher perception of utility? My bet is yes.
- What’s the distribution of use? Do people with few connections use the service less? My bet is yes.
- Do people gain more followers based on hours online, and numbers of Tweets? I bet yes.
- Where is the magic dropout number? A lot of users abandon services like Twitter, but I bet that once you have a network of size N, the likelihood of dropping out decreased dramatically. What is N?
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I was just reflecting today how my ‘follows’ have evolved over time. With almost 500 in my list, I’m also surprised that at times there is very little flow — or little meaningful flow. I’ve developed specific criteria for my follows, but also have some exceptions. Since my answers don’t necessarily correlate to your notes, I’ll avoid numbers and use letters:
A. I review everyone that follows me — there are a lot of spammers that need to be blocked (and surprisingly some of them are not that obvious any more).
B. I read one or more pages of an individual’s recent tweets to see if what they have to say is of value. When I’m not sure, I follow for a while and watch their flow. If the individual isn’t sharing their thoughts, findings and discoveries, they typically get unfollowed.
C. I’d checked out Tim O’Reilly some time ago — he wasn’t using Twitter like he is now. I didn’t follow him until I read he’d finally ‘figured it out’.
D. Oddly, people you know are not necessarily the people you want to follow on Twitter. It depends on your own use of Twitter. For me, a lot of the people I know aren’t focused on the same deep topics I’m interested in.
E. You may get to know people on Twitter better than people you night work with in person, who often don’t share as much, or engage in deep conversations (depends on your own dynamics in either case).
F. I’ve discovered that Twitter requires an ‘immersive’ experience — no one can tell you about it enough for it to make sense, you have to experience it to find the value, and a single experience is often not enough. A good number of people report that they were either ‘hand held’ through the process, experienced it as a result of a conference, or were so shamed into it by others that they kept at it until it made sense.
G. Twitter is a wealth of information for me. Yesterday I watched a newly-posted TED presentation, that talked about how our choices change based on comparisons. I recently found some great sources of information. In comparison some of my existing follows started looking less meaningful — I pruned my list.
H. I’ve not found any of the ‘recommendation’ engines to be useful (indeed many of them offer people I’d never consider following). While I still had to do a lot of filtering myself, I did find a lot of meaningful people to follow last week by doing a Twitter search on “Shirky”. Searching on a relevant topic of interest surfaces people talking about same.
I. There’s an acquired form engaging in real debate (an art form). While I am still a student of the craft, I am often very firm in my statements. I do this to take a stand and to engage in a dialog of discovery. I’m surprised to find that there are a lot of people who can’t engage in such exchanges or can’t approach the conversation in the spirit of discovery. This is unfortunate.
In general, there is a wide-open opportunity for automated methods to assist in both finding AND managing follow lists.
I did also find this utility to leverage Twitter search in a slightly different way to do topical searches and find interesting people to follow: http://twitority.com/
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