Kevork Djansezian/Getty
It's old news, really.
But the issue of inactive accounts on Twitter will become an issue again on Twitter's next earnings call, on which CEO Dick Costolo will - fingers crossed - show some upbeat user and engagement metrics on the social media platform.
On his last call, Twitter's stock was crushed when investors saw that user growth had stalled and engagement on some metrics was in decline. The financials looked rosy, though, but investors are looking at future revenue potential not past performance - so it doesn't matter how good the financials are if the user-base is stagnating.
So this user thing is basically the No.1 problem that Costolo is working to solve right now.
Here's how bad that problem is, according to Twopcharts, a company that tracks Twitter metrics:
- There are 982 million registered accounts.
- But there are only 241 million monthly active users, the most meaningful metric for users.
- That suggests 741 accounts have been abandoned.
- Only 83.4 million tweet more than once per day.
- At least 419 million users' most recent tweet was more than a month ago.
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.
They don't even tweet.
Listening, of course, is a thing. A lot of people use Twitter as a news feed and simply watch the tweets go by without engaging. But that kind of passive behavior is no good when you're a company whose business model is dependent on user engagement.
Twitter is experimenting with a bunch of new stuff to make it easier for new users to get started, and to make it easier to use Twitter for everyone else. Even experienced users often find the user architecture at Twitter confusing (what's the difference between "mentions" and "notifications")? So Twitter has experimented with getting rid of its clunky nomenclature, such as "retweet," and the @ symbol.
Here's Twopcharts' latest set of stats:
Twopcharts