Twitter's Problem Isn't A Lack Of Tweeters

Michelle Obama's Twitter profile page, @flotus, is one of the first to get the new Facebook-like design.

There's a good chance if you use Twitter, you've never tried to distill your wisdom into that 140-character window and pressed the tweet button. This is not, never has been and never will be a problem for Twitter, which doesn't rely on you, me or anyone in particular to send out pithy bits of news or humor. Even without your tweets, there are 500 million new ones every day and if you aren't using Twitter, you should know there's a good chance a whole bunch of them are interesting to you. But the news that 44% of users have never tweeted, reported in the Wall Street Journal and based on a study from Twopcharts, nevertheless got picked up by dozens of media outlets as if they'd suddenly hit on the 'problem' with Twitter.

Here's the good news: This isn't a problem. Instead, it's pretty normal for online communities, which historically have followed something called the 90-9-1 rule. Basically, 90% of people aren't expected to do anything but read content generated by others. The 9% are expected to be contribute occasionally - perhaps responding here and there or, in Twitter's case, re-tweeting something or 'favoriting' it, akin to liking something on Facebook. And it's the 1% who are expected to generate the bulk of the content. On Twitter, celebrates, athletes and journalists of various stripes represent the 1%. They break news there or share it. These tweets offer perspective:

.@rsarver @jasondfox also 99.99% (how many nines?) of TV viewers have never made a TV show.

- Josh Elman (@joshelman) April 11, 2014

For Twitter, consider some statistics. The company reported 241 million active users as of the end of 2013 and the folks at Twopcharts claim that 36.6 million people were tweeting in February 2014. Because Twitter is growing and the figures weren't captured at the same time, those 36.6 million likely represent a bit below 15%, but certainly more than 10%. That sounds just about right, based on the 90-9-1 rule doesn't it? Oh, yes, 43.4 million also tweet at least once a day. Well over 1% for what we could call the 'whales.' In other words, Twitter's user base looks exactly like it's supposed to according to a rule that's been around since online communities came into being decades ago.

(You might spend some time on Facebook and see that even in a closed group like your friends, there are a relatively small number of people who share most of the content, though the figure may well be higher than 10%.)

Still, the online media couldn't help itself in declaring how serious this problem is for Twitter (my comments in italics):

From the WSJ: 'Twitter is having no trouble signing up users. But some new research provides an update on the size of an ongoing problem: getting people to tweet.' This isn't Twitter's problem.... From Mashable: 'For Twitter, increasing engagement helps fight churn, since active users are less likely to abandon the service.' User engagement is about a lot more than Tweeting... From Business Insider: 'The slightly scary takeaway here is that after you put that altogether, you're left with the conclusion that most people who have opened accounts on Twitter don't use Twitter.' Ugh, no... you're only left with that conclusion because you haven't been paying attention....

Here are the big issues for Twitter: How is it that everyone keeps getting that wrong? If people who are paid to talk about the company keep mistaking a lack of tweeters for a Twitter problem, what's the company to do? It turns out Twitter has known the answer for a long time. If you still find Twitter inscrutable or just want to step into the wayback machine, read ' You Don't Have To Tweet To Twitter ' by the venture capitalist Bill Gurley, whose firm Benchmark Capital, backed the company when it was private.

Gurley noted 2 1/2 years ago that Twitter had two serious problems: First, people kept lumping it with Facebook as just another social network. While the two are both social, the fact that Facebook is, at its heart, a place where you interact mostly with people you know gives it more of a ' many to many' feel, which is why I suggested the 90-9-1 rule won't hold as precisely there. Twitter, at its heart is where Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian talk to their millions of fans. It's mostly 'one to many' with the occasional moment where someone in the 'one' responds to someone in the 'many.' If you never do anything but follow people you like, Twitter could bring you a world of interesting things. If you never share anything on Facebook, by contrast, you're either a voyeur of sorts or probably just not very active on the service.

Ironically, instead of embracing this fundamental difference, Twitter is trying to imitate Facebook more and more. The new Twitter profile pages (which are rolling out slowly) look more like Facebook Timeline pages than ever. Coming next, notifications that resemble those on Facebook. In smaller ways, Twitter has encouraged the use of the Favorite button and its built-in messaging system - perhaps its single most confusing feature - as it remakes itself into something that looks familiar.

But Gurley's 2011 post was also correct in identifying Twitter's second problem, albeit in a roundabout way. Ironically, he was focused on pointing out the very thing we're talking about: 'The second, and more critical, Twitter misperception is that you need to tweet, to have something to say and broadcast, for the service to be meaningful to you... 'Why would I tweet?,' and '...but I don't want to tweet' are two common refrains from the non-adopter that highlight this,' he wrote. For Twitter to succeed, people shouldn't even be asking those questions in the first place.

Instead, they should already know that Twitter is where you go to get this wonderful, customized feed of news, gossip, information from any of those 43 million sources. And they should be able to easily get their feed customized to include at least some of those. Twitter is trying to make this work better, but objectively, the experience is still awful (more on this in a future post). Significantly, it's not even clear to the would-be Twitter user that this is the whole reason you'd sign up and use it in the first place.

Which brings us back to the whole 'be like Facebook' business. Twitter can mimic the look and feel of Facebook all it wants, but it can't steal the hook that got you on in the first place: that a friend told you to sign up so you could stay in touch. For Twitter, this represents the very real threat that it won't realize its promise. Gurley was excited in November 2011 that Twitter had reached 100 million monthly active users. That the number is around 250 million 29 months later is more of a glass-half-empty story even though it seems like a big number.

Consider that Facebook bought Instagram in August of 2012 - nearly a year after the Gurley post - when the photo-sharing site had just 30 million users. Last month, Instagram crossed over the 200 million mark, with 50 million signing on in just the past 6 months. The point here isn't that the two services are substitutes (they certainly aren't), but rather that Instagram is growing faster. Despite being about 1/4 the size 2 years ago it's likely to surpass Twitter in users by next year unless something radical changes.

In a nutshell, Twitter's growth so far has allowed it to have a tremendous IPO and the presence of its hashtags and @usernames on a remarkable number of television shows shows its importance as a new medium. Unfortunately, by current standards, its size is also threatening to become a 'medium' in a world where Facebook, WhatsApp, Line and other messaging services have shown that a 'large' - aka more than a billion users - is a very real possibility. The solution to that size problem isn't getting more people tweeting; it's getting more people to understand what they're missing. That we're so far removed from Gurley's post and people are still confused about Twitter's very nature isn't a good sign.

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