Twitter and Facebook / Apples and oranges

Dec 24, 2008 by Dirk Singer

HubSpot, the people behind TwitterGrader (that tool that gives you a Twitter ‘score’ based on followers and posts), has come out with a fairly comprehensive report on Twitter.

A few highlights:

• The overall size of the community is between 4-5 million, with (in view of the amount of airtime Twitter has had over the past year) 70% of accounts having been created over the past year
• HubSpot reckons 30%+ of accounts are inactive
• Twitter is growing at around 5-10k a day, with traffic having grown by 600%+ over the past twelve months
• The average number of followers is around 70

A PDF of the report is available here.

A few comments from other blogs:

Greg Verdino says that some of the stats remind him of Second Life in 2007, when a lot of noise around the virtual world caused a ton of people to check it out, and promptly leave again.

Indeed, just like Second Life, Twitter isn’t always straight-forward to get to grips with, and based on just my own personal experience of people who have signed up but lost interest, I’d say the 30% stat is if anything an underestimate.

Fortunately, even a churn rate of 50% (which is what I’ve personally seen from people I know) is far better than Second Life’s rate of 80-90% who take a look and never come back again.

Media Post runs with the headline “Report reveals Twitter is mostly hype” linking back to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s analysis on ReadWriteWeb that says Twitter would take 36 years to catch Facebook, if Facebook stopped growing today.

Talking about a Twitter bubble is a nice line to take but for me, running a Twitter vs Facebook numbers game is a little spurious.

It’s a bit like if someone had – to use the example here in the UK of the tabloid newspaper The Sun, and the broadsheet The Guardian – made a pronouncement on the Sun kicking the Guardian’s backside due to its circulation numbers being 15x higher.

Though they are newspapers, they are of course very different in both readership and style and you are not comparing like with like. And so it is with Twitter. It might “only” have 4-5 million users, but it’s influence is disportionate to the numbers. As Marshall Kirkpatrick says, Facebook has 30x more users than Twitter, but only 4x as much media share of voice.

Just like a more high brow broadsheet newspaper, Twitter’s low user number base by comparison to Facebook, masks the fact that it’s packed full of social media influencer types who use the network on a regular basis.

And that, unlike Facebook, it’s been used to shape real-time events and been faster than the traditional news. For example with the recent plane crash in Denver, and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

As a result, predictions of a Second Life style bubble seem a little over blown. Twitter will never become ‘the next Facebook’, but it’s already made an enormous impact and if anything will become anything more mainstream.

Image – Telex