Twitter’s strongest users are leaving the platform, weakening its hold on the Social Media space
Recently released documents show that although the Twitter userbase remains steady, it is losing its engagement with its most active users on the platform. This threatens to destabilize the social network of twitter as the “central nodes” of its network are more likely to leave and decrease overall engagement. The article discusses how Twitter’s “heavy tweeters” category of users (defined as people who log into Twitter between 6-7 days per week and tweet 3-4 times per week) are becoming less engaged with the platform, which bodes poorly as Twitter approaches the finalization of its buyout by Elon Musk.
The danger posed by the loss of these users can be understood in terms of social networks. We know that because of the Strong Triadic Closure theory, users with lots of strong connections will tend to foster more connections in the network as they close the “triads” of individuals with strong connections to the same person. Thus, the loss of those strong users (who will have more of the strong connections that deepen the overall connectivity of the network) will have an outsized effect on the network compared to the volume of these users.
The concern is that as the interests of these “heavy tweeters” has shifted over time, the platform has not evolved to keep up with those new interests and therefore keep these critical users engaged. The article discusses how the two fastest-growing interests of heavy tweeters — Cryptocurrency and NSFW-related content — are not generally promoted or focused on by Twitter due to their inherent lack of appeal towards advertisers (cryptocurrency due to its potential for fraud and scamming, and NSFW because, well, it’s NSFW). As heavy tweeters show more interest in these topics as Twitter continues to not place an emphasis on them, they may lose interest in the site and damage the structure of Twitter’s network.
Not only that, but the topics that once drove twitter participation have been in steep decline. Tweets about liberal politics and world news have plummeted despite reaching a high after the January 6th riot in the Capitol, and the data points to this shift being permanent. Additionally, celebrity- and fashion-related tweeting has hit a low recently, another previous titan of tweeters. Essentially, the genres on which Twitter grew, and around which it builds its platform, are becoming more and more irrelevant to its users.
This is what worries Twitter; if they cannot find ways to keep these users, such as by pivoting more towards pornographic and cryptocurrency-based content (two categories that are cited as the fastest-growing interests held by the “heavy tweeter” demographic), they may lose out on their user growth and thus their corporate future.
It should be noted that these findings are for English-speaking Twitter users. Twitter did not provide details as to the proportion of tweets in English, but cited them as an important demographic for their business.
Source Link: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/twitter-losing-most-active-users-internal-documents.html