State of the Twittersphere – Hubspot Reports – Stowe Boyd Retorts
by Rob Paterson
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?
