Have You Lost Your Tweet?

After the growing hysteria last year when it appeared that the Twitter epidemic was more virulent than swine flu, I was interested to see a report in Social Media Today indicating that the chirrup may be going out of this social media phenomenon, despite its 75 million user accounts.

Apparently, although the number of new users is still growing with an impressive 6.2 million new accounts per month (or between two and three per second), less than a fifth of those registered are actually using the site.  It seems that only 17 per cent of those who sign up become users.  The majority of accounts remain inactive; a quarter has no followers; 80 per cent have tweeted less than ten times and 40 per cent have never tweeted at all!

In fact, the number of new accounts was 20 per cent lower than the peak of July 2009 when there were 7.8 million new users.  What’s more, the tweet rate fell to an all-time low in December with only 17 per cent of registered twitterers sending a festive chirrup.  So was last year’s Twitter craze a case of the emperor’s new clothes with people signing up just because everyone else was? 

Despite some of the negative statistics, RJ Metrics which carried out the research believes that Twitter users are becoming more engaged over time when viewed by age sample and, they say, ‘Twitter remains a powerhouse despite the high percentage of inactive users’.  This opinion is based on the fact that despite the high fall off of users with only 20 per cent of tweeters coming back to tweet in their second month, those that don’t fly the nest tweet so much that it makes up for all the people who left.  Also, it appears that users who joined in 2009 tweet more avidly in their first few months than their 2008 counterparts, indicating that active users are actually becoming more engaged over time.

So, despite Stephen Fry’s abdication as the king of Twitter (he announced last month that he was taking a tweet break to write a book to the disappointment of his million followers), it’s probably too early to dismiss this micro blogging site as a mere fad.  For me, the novelty of browsing my tweetdeck or summarising my life in 140 characters has somewhat worn off, but with 15 million highly active tweeters still hard at it, it’s a channel of communication that marketers cannot afford to ignore.