So. Facebook has 750 million active users. Twitter reported an average of 460,000 new accounts per month in March. Google+ has just hit 10 million users.All this strikes me as a little evasive and wildly dishonest.
As a social media professional, I have multiple accounts on many social networks. Do I log into them now and again for client purposes and for looking at things through a dummy account? Yes -- and I bet that makes me a couple of "active users" on Facebook. Have I ever opened a Twitter account in the evening with a brilliant idea and basically forgotten it by morning? Multiple times. Did I check out Google+ first with an account that I no longer use, to see where my information was going to go? Sure did.
When I heard that Google+ had hit 10 million users, my initial response (and post) was:
When they say "users," do they mean people? Because I think they mean accounts. I bet there are plenty of people like me with multiple accounts (for example, all those brand pages that keep getting shut down are run by somebody), and/or people who created an account, checked it out, and have already mentally moved on.When Facebook says they have 750 million active users ... are we under any illusions that they're not counting me like 5 times? And a heck of a lot of other people like me? You can't even claim that they're checking that I'm based on a different computer. I have FIVE MILLION COMPUTERS.
Twitter appears to be the most honest about this, citing "new accounts created" -- and they're also notoriously also the most tight-lipped about their overarching statistics. I bet this is not because they're secretive, but because the numbers are so absurdly high, they would make the error of counting numbers of accounts obvious. Despite Twitter's best efforts, I'm sure plenty of accounts are opened by autobots (or people who sit around opening Twitter accounts and programming them all day, which is basically the same thing).
When McDonald's says they've served 245.3 billion burgers (user-calculated in March 2010), do we think that 245.3 billion people were served? 35 times the earth's population? No. No, because there are jerkstores like me who go in and buy 5 burgers at a time. And everyone knows it.
That's right. A social network account? Is a BURGER. Not a person. And don't let them tell you otherwise.
Suggestion for an improved method of measurement: Why not count the max number of people logged in at a given time and use that as your milestone and benchmark? Sure, a few people could be logged into multiple accounts with multiple devices, but the margin of error (and misguidance) would be dramatically reduced.
Image by jayofboy via sxc.hu. Screenshot of/by myself.
So how many calories did I ingest test driving a google+ account? :)
ReplyDeleteFor a worldwide social network like twitter, a snapshot at a specific time would exclude large numbers of unique users due to the time differentials.
ReplyDeleteI think you are on the right path, but one would need to look at average usage per hour or minute and average length of time on the service to get a better feel.
Okay. So not 10MM. Let's say that 25% of the population has two accounts. (I don't, but I probably will at some point in the future.) That's still 7.5MM people who were at least interested enough to A) get an invite, and B) take a quick tour. Google got 7.5MM people to check them out over the course of two weeks. That's worth something isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAlso: jerkstones = roflcopter.