Elastic Thought

Twitter's Retention Rates are Misleading

Have you seen the Nielsen report entitled "Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth?"  It's definitely made the rounds.  And if your inbox is anything like mine, you have a lot of people asking questions and raising concerns over what this means.

It means nothing, the numbers are misleading.

Here is why.  Twitter is not a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace (comparison from the article).  The question is really how does someone use Twitter?  Since Twitter is used differently than those sites, it may be better to compare it's use to Google reader or NetVibes.  For all of the hype around Twitter, it is a broadcast system.  The trick, then, is attracting and retaining followers.  And that is depend on your content (and the content of others)--not the platform.  In counseling clients, I would say that the stat to watch is how many people link through your tweets and how does that compare to PPC click-through, email read rates or display ad performance.

And then there is the mobile component of Twitter.  Even though Facebook has an iPhone app, no other platform of this size is so portable.  With the 140 character limit and open API, Twitter makes a lot of use of 3rd party clients, text messaging, and a myriad of mobile applications.  In looking at Twitter usage patterns, many Twitter users start off using the web site interface, then quickly migrate to a third-party applications on the web and through mobile clients.  Take a look at this graphic: (full list here)

Perhaps Nielsen did not take this into account for the full story.  But either way, this is not the end of Twitter.  If you promote your Twitter feed properly, tweet good content, and find value in its use-- you get a lot of conversation started, linking to relevant content, and gather insight that helps you or your company--then retention rate of the web site alone is not a measure of whether you should use Twitter in your mix of communications tools or not.

After all, this is social media.  It wouldn't be any fun if this stuff was 100% predictable, consistent, and stagnant.  (Though the ad guys would love that, wouldn't they?!)

Online Marketing, YouTube and Twitter Have Arrived

Actually, as it was quoted: “We now have indisputable proof that online marketing, 

YouTube and Twitter and all that it encompasses is meaningful and has arrived,” said Gene Grabowski, chair of the crisis and litigation practice at Levick Strategy Communications. “We are seeing real consequences to a mistake. If [social networks] didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see this type of reaction from J&J or consumers.”  [Advertising Age (11.17.08)]

This is in response to the Motrin ad campaign that implied moms carried their babies as fashion accessories.  In short, Kathy Widmer summed it up this way: "...we missed the mark and insulted many moms.  We didn't mean too...but we did."

Twitter moms that were offended (and had many followers) collected their outrage and Katja Presnal posted them on YouTube. (61,705 views as of this posting)  Motrin pulled the ad this past Sunday.

Two interesting things I see here:

The obvious is that a storm of activity in the social networks brought the legendary marketing machine at J&J to pull an ad and admit a mistake--

"We are listening to you, and we know that's the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.  In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:  a) When you make a mistake - own up to it, and say you’re sorry.  b) Learn from that mistake.  That’s all... for now. "

Which brought Gene Grabowski to announce in AdAge the arrival of the social media we've all been asking the companies to listen to and respect.

But the second thing I see here is that the ad was actually up for several weeks before it was noticed by Jessica Gottlieb in LA and she began her tweets.  That started the snowball.  it points to two things:  a) the influencer model still works online  and b) you don't know when these things will creep up on you.  The internet is not always immediate, so monitoring is very important.  You can alleviate this, though...or at the very least mitigate your risk.

I've always talked about the social media spaces as being "free" focus groups.  A lot of market researchers will say that the social media space is not "statistically relevant," doesn't have a "proper control group," and things like that.  But what would it hurt if J&J knew who some influential moms were (hell, they could have just went to Twitter Grader on this one and skipped the complicated influence rankings of social media folks)?  Could they have run some spots by them to get their opinion?  Chances are they would have caught this, and probably would have gotten good "press" from those they approached as being mindful of the online community.

Maybe now that "Online Marketing, YouTube and Twitter Have Arrived" they will next time.  I hope you do too.

More to come...