Has Twitter (Gasp) Hit a Ceiling?

This rendered one of my predictions a few months back -- that Twitter would eclipse CNN's web traffic by the end of May -- dead wrong. CNN has it own challenges, as its traffic was off by 8.05 percent in May, but it still had 7.5 million more monthly visitors than did Twitter.

The giant of social media wasn't suffering last month, however. Facebook grew by an impressive 8.54 percent, and its web audience (over 113 million) is now some six times as large as Twitter's. Facebook is also, according to Compete, now the third-largest website, behind Google (145 million+) and Yahoo (135 million+).

Having been burned by my CNN-Twitter prediction, I'm not going to speculate as to when Facebook may actually surpass Yahoo other than to note that that could well happen later on this year.

Two Harvard researchers released a report last week that indicates that only 10 percent of those using Twitter account for 90 percent of its activity. The authors go on:

"On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia...This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."

The study also found an unusual gender pattern: Both women and men follow many more men than women on Twitter. "These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks," note the authors. "On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women -- men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know."

The authors raise this intriguing question: "We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.)."

Finally, another recent study by Nielsen found that more than 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Now, that does not sound like such an attractive growth arc for a social media service. Nielsen interprets these findings as presenting a "roadblock" to long-term growth at Twitter.

Who knows, but at this point, I'd have to say that if I were a Twitter exec, I'd be more focused on user retention, as well as extending the life of the average Tweet beyond the current 20-30 seconds. Building a service based on ephemera is a great concept.

Turning it into a successful business, however, requires a long-term strategy that, to date, appears to be lacking at Twitter.

(Thanks to Mark MacNamara for pointing me to the Harvard and Nielsen reports.)