Comments on: Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks

By: xxooxx

xxooxx — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:15:00 +0000

ed hardy ed hardy
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ed hardy shop ed hardy shop
christian audigier christian audigier
ed hardy cheap ed hardy cheap
ed hardy outlet ed hardy outlet
ed hardy sale ed hardy sale
ed hardy store ed hardy store
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By: socialnetworkdesign

socialnetworkdesign — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:43:06 +0000

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

By: ZappingDigital.cl

ZappingDigital.cl — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:40:06 +0000

nice article!

By: Josh_UK

Josh_UK — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:05:56 +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.

By: Sergio Abranches

Sergio Abranches — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:47:54 +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

By: Jesse Farmer

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:00:16 +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.

By: Josh_UK

Josh_UK — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:47:08 +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.

By: Jesse Farmer

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:31:28 +0000

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

By: NextMark

NextMark — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:10:22 +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.

By: Jesse Farmer

Jesse Farmer — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:12:23 +0000

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.

By: Kyle Rohde

Kyle Rohde — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:38:11 +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.