Close to half of Twitter's 974 million existing accounts have never actually tweeted, according to data cited in a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Twopcharts, a website that tracks Twitter activity, said that 44 percent of Twitter's accounts have never sent 140 characters or less through the service. As Twitter adds more features and becomes increasingly Facebook-like in an effort to bring in more users, is this bad news for the bird?
Twitter itself defines active users as accounts that log in at least once a month and cited 241 million such users in the last quarter of 2013. Its numbers compare with WhatsApp, the messaging service recently purchased by Facebook in a $19 billion deal, which has 450 million users worldwide.
Accounts in general also aren't constantly vocal on Twitter, with some 30 percent writing 10 or fewer tweets and only 13 percent of all users sending at least 100 tweets.
WSJ calls these statistics a "retention problem" since people tend to try the service without necessarily ever sending another tweet. But is Twitter's real problem found in its user numbers?
"For Twitter to succeed, people shouldn't even be asking those questions in the first place," said Forbes contributor Mark Rogowsky. "Instead, they should already know that Twitter is where you go to get this wonderful, customized feed of news, gossip, information from any of those 43 million sources."
Rogowsky cites the 90-9-1 rule that has historically guided online communities like Twitter; in this ratio, 90 percent of people just read content, 9 percent contribute occasionally and 1 percent generate most of what is said.
The 1 percent, which usually comprises celebrities, athletes and journalists, breaks news and shares content.
"Twitter's user base looks exactly like it's supposed to according to a rule that's been around since online communities came into being decades ago," Rogowsky wrote.
The message-based platform's real problem comes when people view it as just another social network like Facebook and don't understand how it should be used.
"The solution to that size problem isn't getting more people tweeting; it's getting more people to understand what they're missing," Rogowsky wrote. "That we're so far removed from Gurley's post and people are still confused about Twitter's very nature isn't a good sign."
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