Missing the Boat in Measuring Twitter?
Not only do Nielsen stats saying Twitter has a hard time retaining users miss all those who use third party applications to Tweet, as Steve Safran notes, they also miss the mobile portion. Twitter, let’s not forget, was initially devised as a mobile app whose founders discovered its power during an earthquake. Part of Twitter’s beauty is its ability to let us communicate seamlessly across apps, platforms, handhelds, networks, etc. It’s in my browser one moment, a mobile phone, next, a favorite app after that. Conceiving of the impact of a digital property as traffic to a Website under a specific URL is not very 2009. Web traffic, alone, misses a significant portion of the impact. Just ask Tweetdeck, Tweetie, or anyone who gets alerts and tweet via their mobile phone using the short code 40404.
Nielsen, in trying to get at Twitter’s impact, compares its Web traffic to that of MySpace and Facebook, and retention of users at a similar stage in each company on their websites. But, today, making someone go to a specific site can in itself be considered a weakness — a lesson Facebook appears to be learning with Facebook Connect and more open architecture that allows people to interact, at least some, “off-deck.”
Each of these social networks is different, impactful in different ways. I discover musicians on MySpace, friends and colleagues on Facebook, colleagues and business leads on LinkedIn and news on Twitter. Each feels different, and attracts different crowds and different uses. As Twitter is unique in its use case, stats that count only its website’s traffic don’t just miss the boat quantitatively, but there’s also a qualitative disconnect.
Dorian Benkoil, the host of the WebTV series Naked Media, is a principal at Teeming Media, a digital media events, research and editorial business consultancy.
I definitely think that Nielsens is having a tough time measuring Twitter’s reach because it’s so distributed and multi-platform. Also they don’t have the inside scoop on user retention and many times they have been incorrect. For me, I very rarely use the web interface, but am an addict :)!
I was going to write about this earlier today.
Your right that Nielsen is using the wrong measurement stick for Twitter.
They’re stuck using Web measurement for something that uses the Internet solely as a communication and distribution platform but not as an interface platform.
Most that I know don’t use the Twitter Web site. It makes no sense for them to do so. And if they do, it’s as a last resort and not a first option.