There’s an eagle that lives in our yard. Every day, I see this bird sitting on a branch surveying our yard and the ones neighboring us. He’s not in the nest – that’s up higher in another tree. He’s sitting quite still just waiting. Nothing moves his from his task – the wind doesn’t distract him, rain doesn’t seem to deter him. He’s focused on one thing – his next meal. Compare that with your day. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Online Communities
Opting Out
It’s nice of folks to follow me on Twitter and in general I follow them right back. What happens next has become interesting. Quite often, I get a direct message (which in my case leads to a text message on my phone) thanking me for the follow and urging me to do something (click here, read this, etc.). That’s when I opt out – I either unfollow them or report them for spam if most of their tweets seem to be spammy – and I gather I’m not alone. Continue reading
Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints
Facts and Findings
Good example in the last 24 hours of why we always need to question statistics. Since these concern Twitter, I’ll keep this brief although not 140 characters. Multiple sources got themselves in a frenzy yesterday buy publishing, as did one source, the following:
Traffic to Twitter continues to decline as the microblogging site seems to have passed its peak in popularity, according to data aggregated by eMarketer. Nielsen has traffic to Twitter.com down by a dramatic 27.8% between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors. comScore claims unique visitors to the site are down by 8.1% in October. Compete reports a 2.1% decline during the month.
Wow. Twitter has jumped the shark. Short the stock. Number don’t lie, right? Well, if you read the same source this morning, wrong:
Disclaimer to those Twitter stats we published yesterday: the figures just include unique visitors to the Twitter web site and do not include third-party application or mobile phone usage, according to Nielsen. That’s not to say that apps that feed into the Twitter community such as TweetDeck, TwitPic, Tumblr, etc. aren’t also losing followers, however. Nielsen studied audience retention on a number of those apps last April and found that about 60% of users who try these services end up abandoning them after one month – about the same abandonment ratio as on Twitter.com.
Well, we all know that there is a large abandon rate for many new apps and services as users try them until them settle on the one with which they’re most comfortable and which accomplishes whatever task to their satisfaction. I’ve been through a bunch of Twitter interfaces just as I’ve tried and abandoned several niche social networks, different browser add-ins, and even makes of PC over the years. One quick look at the tweets I get from the folks I follow shows a wide diversity of clients, very few of which are the Twitter interface itself.
The lesson? Don’t take research at face value. Ask questions, especially the ones not asked in the research itself. Those are my thoughts. What are yours?
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Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints, Reality checks
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