Cool numbers, but don't they contradict the Harvard Business Review report from yesterday? Overall retention of Twitted is fairly poor and your avg. only seems to come back once every month. As a consequence, 90% of all activity on Twitter is accounted for by a mere 10% of all users.

Link to the report http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

The tool is especially effective when continuous updates are needed, like sports events or emergency situations. But for ordinary people it is not an easy thing to tweet regularly, because of its less interactive aspect compared with Facebook or other social media.

However, I think mobile devices have something to do with the future of Twitter. Recently I did a survey among college students for my assignment, and 58 percent answered that they use a mobile device as a tool to access social media. The number is likely to go up as technology advances and that trend might help Twitter to keep up its retention rate. Like text messaging, the microblogging may flourish with mobile devices.

It might make sense to divide user practices and twitter use cases into personal, social, and public. The latte being the newest, social being the most common, and personal being a mode tweetdeckers get into as twitter becomes an open chat channel.

The public use case speaks to a kind of ambient intimacy around celebrities and big name brands, and almost looks like an extension of the mass media into social media. That mass media disrupt social media is ironic but it’s a fact. I would think that a lot of new users will churn out if they don’t get conversational and social after first joining twitter. Ego casting may be a questionable cultural pastime, but it beats the ego inflation or extension that’s at the heart of the follower game!

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I’m loving the new interconnectedness w/ fbook inside of twitter clients. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that!

cheers!
adrian

Did you read Aimee Greeblemonkey’s more sarcastic take on Twitter celebrities?

Celebrity Is As Celebrity Does(She is the one who turned me on to your site.)

This tendency will only increase as we hurtle towards a real-time web. FriendFeed has launched the world’s first real-time, live streaming, social media service that is set to revolutionize all media. Yet as people constantly and seamlessly update their “lifestream”, I wonder about the role of meaningful communication?

The funny – and yes timely – Flutter April Fools joke (below) parodied our growing obsession with instantaneous information, exposing the growing misunderstanding that the newness of a means of communication automatically makes that communication meaningful.

The important distinction, as Zeus Jones points out, is that while real time information loses value over time, timeless pieces grow in value.

When you consider brands also rely on an emotional connection with their customers to motivate their behavior, this confusion can be costly. Of course, a meaningful connection isn’t always timeless but the same limitations apply. Hoping to generate trust, interest or loyalty in 140 characters alone is as misguided as a guy wheeling out his best one-liner at a bar. Brands must use a composite of media to build an effective relationship with their customers, rather than see social media as an end in itself. Even when a brand, its products or social entrepreneurship becomes the focal point for conversation it must also play the overarching role of “aggregator and curator”, as Joseph Jaffe asserts, “to provide a place where consumers can see the conversations pulled together, engage with the brand, hear the story in the brand’s voice”.

A means of communication is not an end in itself. It exists to create a connection that enables us to recognize ourselves in others. If our daily exchanges are reduced to a teeming sea of quips, asides and blunt reductions, we simply enlist ourselves in the service of data tracking. As if our lives were some enormous marketing focus group and our communication ticks for empty boxes.

When communication becomes a shooting gallery, the first casualty is dialogue that adds meaning to our lives. As both marketers and consumers, we would be foolish to let this happen. Not wonder we have trouble holding on to so many people.

Regardless of whether Nielsen missed one or another thing in its measurement of Twitter retention, what the results will show, at the end of the day, is that Twitter does have higher attrition among its users.

Reason is, it’s just harder to survive and thrive in a community where the value of your persona is not in the asset of your profile (as in the case of Facebook), but rather the currency of your conversation and the worth of the information you bring to the shared table of the community.

In a way, as social media pushes us further forward into the future at speeds we hardly fathom, Twitter brings us back to the olden times of Plato and Aristotle when words had meaning.

OK, then follow the people who provide relevant, useful information! And if you spend 15 minutes on Twitter per day, you can effectively build a core audience of engaged followers, essentially providing a broadcast channel for you or your brand to distribute information.

I recently ran a quick study to see who was actually paying attention on Twitter and measured the response rate to a “useful” post. http://bit.ly/OuvQ6

I was thinking tonight at a twitter tool I could use to talk and enlarge audiences on the social web. May be a general social web tool (facebook, twitter, etc.)

For example: Twitter for a multi-language audience. If you’re from x you receive the x1 msgs, if you are from y you receive only y1 msgs, etc. This way I can talk to people from different corners of the world without sending them messages that they are not interested in or cannot understand. Big companies could use this, users could use this too.

Andrei Sava
http://www.andreisava.eu