Best Reading of the Day - Entry 0195 Metrics for Engagement via Twitter

As the Participation Age has dramatically changed the way marketers should be looking at their interactions with consumers (participants).  However some of the metrics have remained unchanged, possibly for too long.  Here is a worthy story on one piece of that:

http://recode.net/2015/02/09/the-monthly-active-user-metric-should-be-retired-but-what-takes-its-place/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Twitter (unintentionally) took on an interesting challenge last week during its fourth-quarter earnings call: It tried to explain to investors why the company lost four million users during the previous quarter.

These users, who had been counted as “monthly active users” the quarter before, had simply vanished from Twitter’s total user count. Poof.

The simple explanation: The bulk of these four million people were not actually using Twitter. They were counted as part of a feature in the iPhone’s Safari Web browser that automatically pulled Twitter data whether the user was reading it or not. After the iOS 8 update, that automatic data collection was halted, and the people who were originally counted as “active” disappeared from the pot.

This loss of users who probably weren’t really users got me thinking: How accurate are the “monthly active user” metrics shared by companies like Facebook and Twitter?

If you wish to read more I recommend 'Marketing in the Participation Age' by Daina Middleton.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant