Neilsen Wire, the media and marketing information company, set the twitosphere alight this week when it announced that Twitter, despite is impressive growth, has failed to attract Teens.
The Neilsen survey of 250,000 Internet users in the States showed that only 16% of under 25 year olds actively use the Twitter website; with the majority of the site’s user-generated-content being created by 25 to 54 year olds.
But is Neilsen looking in the wrong places?
The problem with simply assessing the number of active users is that it fails to take into account the site’s wider audience; the number of tweets each user posts or, indeed, who is looking at the site.
These active users are only the tip of the iceberg.
This all hinges on Jakob Nielsen’s concept of “Participation Inequality”. The web usability guru Nielsen (as opposed to the company Nielsen) believes that within any social network about 90% of the content will be generated by only 1% of the users while 90% of the users will actually not create any content; they will simply “lurk” the site. The remaining 9% of users will create about 9% of the content. This creates a ratio of 90:9:1 (90% Inactive Users, 9% Occasionally Active Users and 1% Regular Active Users). Although Neilsen himself points out that this ratio is only a guide, and although the ratio numbers can change, the fact will remain that the majority of users will not actively participate.
As Nielsen says;
“The ‘Causes’ application on Facebook had 25 million users in April 2009, but only 185,000 had given a donation…Thus, social networking for charity […]has a [ratio of…] 99:1:0.”
This all sounds bad but it isn’t necessarily; the Nielsen research simply reveals the complexity of understanding social web interactions. Inactive Users might be highly interested in a social website, be it for a corporation, celebrity or friend but may not have the ability for one reason or another (be it computer literacy, connection speed, finances or even shyness) to participate.
To put this into context in Cadbury’s viral “Eyebrow Dance” advert has attracted 4,327,628 views on YouTube but only 11,564 comments and 122 video responses. Therefore, assuming the 122 people who posted video responses are Active Users and the 11,564 comments as Occasionally Active Users the Cadbury’s campaign records a ratio of 97.97 : 0.027: 0.003.
Considering the technical complexities, for many users, of creating and uploading a video to YouTube the Cadbury campaign can be seen as a great success. The fact is that for any social web campaign to succeed it does not need a huge number of users to actively participate; it only needs a small amount of content that is easily accessible.
Of course this also applies to social websites too. According to the social media analytics site Sysomos.com 21% of registers Twitter users have never tweeted, while 75% of all tweets come from 5% of the sites registered users (these statistics, however, fail to take into account the total number of unregistered users who simply visit (“lurk”) the site).
Therefore the success or failure of any social website or social web campaign cannot be accurately measured by the amount of comments received or by the number of people following but only, perhaps, by the total number of unique visitors.
So what if teens don’t tweet: they don’t have to and Twitter doesn’t need them to. As long as they, along with the 1 billion + other Internet users have access to the site the value of Twitter, as a marketing and social website, in secured.