DISQUS

Kyle Rohde · 7 months ago

It also doesn't at all talk about the use of third-party apps to access Twitter - am I a quitter if i don't access Twitter.com for 30 days but use TweetDeck instead?

Poor research by Nielsen, IMO.

Jesse Farmer · 7 months ago

Kyle,

Nielsen released an updated report with those third-party apps included, here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobi...

According to them the numbers remain the same.

My question is, what is their methodology that they have to whitelist all the sources of Twitter traffic? How would they know they aren't missing some key source of traffic?

You can just get the data directly from the Twitter API.

Of course, Nielsen has a vested interest in protecting their proprietary methodology, so nobody is ever going to be able to reproduce their results. We'll just have to take their word for it.

My data, OTOH, I'm going to release under a CC license once I find a place to host it for free. You can also conduct the experiment yourself by generating a random list of Twitter IDs and fetching the data using the Twitter API.

NextMark · 7 months ago

That's a good point regarding the third party applications. I use the TweetLater service, but I'd hope that Nielsen's research is based on posted activity and not the source of those posts.

Jesse Farmer · 7 months ago

It is based on the source. Their second report just included more sources.

Josh_UK · 7 months ago

Does this also take into account the mass account spamming that went on last month? One group created around 450,000 accounts in 24 hours.

Jesse Farmer · 7 months ago

No, it does not. Those users will show up as non-retained users. If they never tweeted, they won't show up in the 1+ tweets group, though.

Is there a reliable way of identifying these accounts? I can filter the data to exclude them.

Josh_UK · 7 months ago

Sorry no there isn't, I could show you the script they used but that's about it. The names were randomly generated so you'd end up blocking a lot of innocent people too.

Sergio Abranches · 7 months ago

Very good analysis. There is also the case of people that sign up never tweet but read tweets of twitters they follow. Not quitters. I'd call them latent users, perhaps with a steeper learning curve or a tighter time-frame. Sérgio Abranches @abranches

ZappingDigital.cl · 7 months ago

nice article!

socialnetworkdesign · 6 months ago

omg twitter is doing just fine...all the buzz and amazing results we are all getting using Twitter correctly is proof.