To tweet or not to tweet? Well, it seems most people are opting for the latter as one report indicates that 44 percent of the 978 million Twitter accounts haven't so much as made a peep, much less a tweet, according to Twitter activity tracker Twopchart.
Compare this with what takes place on Facebook on a daily basis and one might see why Twitter executives are now desperately trying to make their service appear and act more like Facebook.
On an average day, about 48 percent of Facebook's 1.3 billion users log onto their page, according to the tracking service Statisticbrain. Combined, these folks are spending 640 million minutes on the site each month.
Compounding the problem for Twitter is not only the general activity, but that it runs very deep into the social media's subscriber base. Joining the 44 percent in not tweeting at all are the 30 percent of Twitter account owners who have only bothered to tweet between one and 10 times. Only 13 percent of the accounts have tweeted more than 100 times. On the bright side, more than half of all accounts, 542 million, have tweeted at least once, meaning that people are willing to give the service a try, but for some reason quickly tire of it or are frustrated.
Twitter itself considers people an active user of its service if the person merely logs onto the account at least one per month. Following this criteria, the company said it has around 241 million active users.
Facebook users are not only more active but, for many, checking the site is the first thing they do each day. Statisticbrain reported that 48 percent of users between the ages of 18 and 34 check Facebook when they wake up each morning, with 28 percent of those grabbing their phones and doing so before they even get out of bed. This is made possible by the 680 million downloads of Facebook's mobile app.
Twitter realizes it has a problem keeping its users engaged and over the last several weeks has announced several changes to the site.
One possibility raised was eliminating hashtags and the other symbology.
Other possible changes include a larger profile photo, pinned tweets that will remain on their homepage, and filtered tweets that only show those from certain people.
