VentureBeat - Latest Comments in Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

M65 Jacket — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:51:56 -0000

Very nice article, It’s too early to tell, but the first-month drop-off is not a sign that Twitter is doing something wrong.
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Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Sandy Rowley - SEO Expert — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:43:06 -0000

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

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Néstor Carrasco L. — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:40:06 -0000

nice article!

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Josh_UK — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:05:56 -0000

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.

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Sergio Abranches — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:47:54 -0000

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

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:00:16 -0000

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.

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Josh_UK — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:47:08 -0000

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.

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:31:28 -0000

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

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

NextMark — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:10:22 -0000

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.

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Jesse Farmer — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:12:23 -0000

Kyle,

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

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.

Re: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

Kyle Rohde — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:38:11 -0000

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.