Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse
Though Twitter is still getting newbie users, many are inactive — Computerworld - The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 75-million figure arrives in a week of housekeeping at Twitter: on January 19, 2010 the company said it would release old, neglected usernames from inactive accounts for others to claim, and on January 22 it rolled out a revamped suggested users list that commentators immediately flagged as having crippled the SUL's former power to funnel thousands of followers a day to listed accounts.
Alongside that, Twitter began rolling out Local Trends, extending its real-time trending-topics capability to locations by combining trend data with geolocation. Those discovery surfaces read as answers to exactly the problem this study quantifies: a large registered base whose engaged core is much smaller than the headline number implies.
First-order effects
- Advertisers, media buyers, and prospective partners sizing up Twitter against the 75M headline now face an audience whose active share — per the study — is well below the total, forcing any reach pitch to be argued on engaged users rather than registrations.
- Twitter's own decision days earlier to recycle usernames from dormant accounts becomes materially more valuable: the study confirms the dormant pool it is drawing from is the majority of the base.
Second-order effects
- Curation surfaces turn into the conversion battleground — the controversial revamped suggested users list and the geolocation-driven Local Trends rollout are Twitter's levers for turning silent registrations into readers, and the backlash over the SUL shows how contested that curation already is.
- Measurement expectations shift downstream: once a top-10 consumer service admits most accounts are asleep, third-party tracking and any future ad-rate arguments get pressured toward activity-based counts instead of cumulative signups.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across fast-growing networks, social-platform credibility migrates from registered-user totals to active-user metrics, making engagement products — discovery, curation, relevance — the structural differentiator rather than the size of the signup funnel.
- Dormant accounts become an asset-management problem in their own right: username recycling, abandoned follow graphs, and stale profiles turn into inventory that large social services have to actively curate rather than ignore.
The trend: Social platforms are shifting from being judged on cumulative signups to being judged on active engagement, with discovery and curation features carrying the burden of reactivating dormant users.