Blogosphere All A Twitter Over Forrester Estimates

There was a minor Internet dustup last week over a topic that most online users have never even heard of: “Twittering”.

Forrester analyst Peter Kim, in his report, Microblogging for Marketers, estimated that 6% of adult online users in the U.S. used micro-blogging platform Twitter at least monthly.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Microblogging is a fairly new technology that enables people to communicate with those in their social network via short posts, typically a sentence or two (maximum 140 characters) with a link. The most well known microblogging platform is called Twitter; others in the space include Pownce, still in limited beta, and Jaiku. Microblogging is much like SMS text messaging, though in a many-to-many environment.

After indicating that Twitter attracted approximately 447,000 unique visitors in August, the report stated that:

Six percent of online US adults use Twitter at least monthly or more frequently.

That figure jumped out at various bloggers, most notably Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft executive and publisher of the well-read Scobleizer blog. Using those figures, even assuming that 100% of Twitter users were U.S. adults, it would suggest that only 7.5 million American adults were online users. According to Scoble:

My data shows that the regular users are between 50,000 and 300,000, a high percentage of which are outside the United States. That doesn’t come anywhere close the numbers required for 6%. Keep in mind that Hotmail has 200 million users each month. Yahoo mail says they have about 250 million worldwide users.

Kim later responded in his blog that the source of the 6% number was an online survey conducted by Forrester, where 6% of respondents selected “monthly” or more frequently in response to the question “How frequently do you use… Twitter”?

Whatever the true number of online “Twitterers,” the larger question may be the original premise of the report – whether microblogging is an effective medium to reach an “affluent, well educated and early adopter audience”. As commenter Mickeleh notes, the flaw in that logic is that:

Most Twitterers won’t see anything you post. Twitter lets users create a channel of folks that they follow. If you’re not followed, you’re invisible.

While any market research is subject to challenge, forecasting data in this segment is a risky business. The blogosphere is ready to pounce on any potential data discrepancy, as Internet analyst Mary Meeker learned a few weeks ago, when a calculation error overstated her estimate of the impact of Google’s new YouTube overlay ads.

The Forrester report, Microblogging for Marketers, is available for purchase.

Technorati Tags: blog, Forrester, internet, Robert-Scoble, Twitter

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Monday, October 29th, 2007 : Equity Research, Industry Research : No Comments

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