Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Breaking the 90-10 “rule” – Twitter vs. Facebook, and customer communities

June 12th, 2009

By now we’ve all seen the numbers showing that 90% of Twitter’s content is contributed by 10% of their users.

  • First thought: why is this a surprise?
  • Second thought: why is no one talking about how to change these numbers?

What we should be asking is:

How can we break the 90-10 “rule”?

It can be done.  Un-scientific research of my Facebook friends shows that over 30% of them update their status at least weekly.  (My Facebook friends include a large number of early mainstream/late mainstream technology adopters, so I suspect that’s a fairly representative number.)  Lithium, who powers enterprise online communities, says that their audience participation rate is also around 30%.

What is it about Facebook and well-run online communities that converts three times as many users from passive participants into active contributors?

  1. Sponsors. Most people join Facebook at the urging of friends, who provide some context as to “what is this, and what do you do here”. You listen to them because you trust them.
  2. Unofficial Mentors. Thriving online communities have naturally-emerging leaders – people who’ve been around, know some history, and take pride in helping new arrivals find information and understand the “unwritten rules” of the community.  Lithium actively encourages development of these “super-members”.
  3. Context. People join Facebook to stay involved with friends.  People join online communities because of a desire to learn or participate in a shared interest.
  4. Don’t-Make-Me-Think Contribution. Moving the community norm towards shorter, more frequent updates encourages spontaneity – people don’t feel the pressure to compose, re-read, and make sure they sound “smart enough”
  5. Critical Mass. Immediately seeing people you know, or an activity indicator like “418 posts in the past 24 hours” signals users that it’s worth their time investment to contribute.
  6. Immediate Perceived Value. The shorter the time between arriving and finding content that is informative, rare, useful, or about you, the more likely people are to stick around.

Twitter obviously has the #4 (140 character limit, no editing) and #5 (3700% growth last month) covered.

But if Twitter wants to keep competing with Facebook to be the platform for expression, they’ve got to incorporate more of #1, 2, 3, and 6.

Sponsors: Allow people to invite friends using the Facebook (and LinkedIn) social graphs.  Encourage them to add at least one “tag” about each friend and include “suggested people to follow” based on that tag with the invitation.

Mentors: I have no doubt that there are thousands of Twitter-ers who would volunteer to “mentor” a new Twitter joiner, especially if there was some cursory demographic matching.  (I would happily spend an hour or so with a new-to-Twitter product manager, for example.)

Context: Oh, I know the whole point is that Twitter is “whatever you want it to be!”  Yeah, sometimes the serendipity needs to be toned down – too many choices are paralyzing.

Allow new users to choose a “flavor” of how they think they want to use Twitter and show them suggested people to follow who use it that way.  This could be powered off a completely user-populated database – little work for Twitter themselves.

Immediate Perceived Value: Finding people outside your social web but inside your “interests web” is incredibly valuable.  Twitter should buy one of those user-populated directories already and MrTweet and make it an official part of the service.

Popularity: 2% [?]


Popularity: 2% [?]
  • http://www.puristproductmanagement.blogspot.com PuristProductManagement

    acceptance of statistics as “common wisdom” leads to apathy as you correctly point out. being relatively (re)new to twitter having basked in its glory a year ago, I’m surprised at the lack of pace of the product. The value proposition remains sound, and its core competitencies are strong and have elements which are unique, but there’s not much innovative as yet – But then again, it could all come out as one big bang, which would be fine as long as we’ve not all gone elsewhere in the meantime

  • Jim Holland

    Cindy – nice post. I believe there are some personas in social media that do not want to provide content, but connect and learn first. Others are unsure of the basics of how to use and derive information from Twitter (newbies). Many leaders, and other senior managers have to accept how they manage their time and participate with there teams (time management). @valworkman has some great insight on the percentages, personas and how it impacts Twitter.

  • Cindy

    PuristProductManager: Yes, I know the Twitter team is small, but I’m really surprised they haven’t taken more advantage of the supporting tools that have been built (but are not findable by the “average” new user).

    They wouldn’t even need to buy/integrate these companies – just featuring them as part of signup would provide SOME benefit.

    Jim: Exactly – and those personas could be addressed with a well-thought-out “how do you want to use Twitter” wizard. You don’t have to tweet to get value – but you do need to know where to look.

  • http://laurelpapworth.com Laurel Papworth

    I’m not a believer in one community cherry picking the bestest ideas from another community. We like blogs because they are open, broadcast, delayed content (created in isolation). We like Facebook because it’s NOT – no writing long articles, not preaching to an empty room. Facebook is about distribution inside closed/gated communities. We like Twitter because it’s quick and dirty and synchronous comms (realtime) – adding scrabble and zombies to Twitter to gjve something that newbies with few followers can do, will create social networks that all look alike. And generic does not equal good in social spaces.

    For me, Dr. Jakob Neilsen’s 90:9:1 rule* no longer holds true – 26% of users are now creators (Forresters) . Twitter is still sorting out some of the basics: Purpose & Value Systems, Profiles (report card), Places (things to do if you dont follow any/many), Roles & Responsibilities (how to create leaderboards for example), Leaders (actually Twitter have that covered), Rites and rituals (tho they built in the @ after the users created it), Rules & etiquette (varies, hello spammers!), Events (#channels might cover that), Subgroups (they need to introduce groups, or we use Friendfeed). But i don’t think the answer for every social network should be the same answer. Homongenous = boring, in my book! :)

    *90:9:1 rule is here http://laurelpapworth.com/jakob-nielsen-9091-rule/

  • http://www.cindyalvarez.com Cindy

    Laurel: Good point. I’ve argued elsewhere that I wouldn’t want Twitter updates to be the same, content-wise, as Facebook status updates.

    I think Twitter puts a bigger burden on the user to figure out “what do you want from this” and I think that’s fine – but it would be great if they had more exposure to “What are the possibilities? How are other people using this? What are other peoples’ strategies for learning or publishing here?”

  • http://www.lithium.com Joe Cothrel

    Forrester’s number means that 26% of internet users create content somewhere on the web. Nielsen’s 90-9-1 applies only to a given community at a given time. These numbers measure different things — they can’t be used to validate or invalidate each other.

  • http://twitter.com/cindyalvarez cindyalvarez

    @BestOfTowitter What #Twitter can steal from Facebook, other online communities, to beat the 90%/10% content rule: http://sn.im/jzm3v

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/PuristProdMgr PuristProdMgr

    RT @cindyalvarez Breaking the 90-10 “rule” – Twitter vs. Facebook, and customer communities http://is.gd/ZYm0 #prodmgmt #innovation

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/Jim_Holland Jim_Holland

    Commented on @cindyalvarez 90/10 rule post http://bit.ly/ozZ7j #prodmgmt #marketing #leadership

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/cindyalvarez cindyalvarez

    Comm mgrs (@cothrel @LLiu @SilkCharm @TheCR @tomhumbarger), would love yr comments on Breaking 90-10 participation “rule” http://sn.im/jzm3v

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/trevorrotzien trevorrotzien

    RT @cindyalvarez: Breaking 90-10 participation “rule” http://sn.im/jzm3v in social media [Valuable tips]

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/LLiu LLiu

    Breaking 90-10 “rule” http://bit.ly/3pkv8 (by @cindyalvarez) [Gr8 tips but u must know community life cycle http://bit.ly/18PXNo b4 using!]

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/cindyalvarez cindyalvarez

    @ms5 Note that tips in my blog post (http://sn.im/jzm3v) are more like gen’l best practices. Wouldn’t suggest Mafia Wars or poke for Twitter

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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