Social Media Stats Are Sexy, But Lack Substance

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It’s always a good day when you can break out a Mark Twain quote. In this case, his words (as borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli or another coiner) about lies, damned lies and statistics came to mind when a tweet from a well-known Gen Y career expert happened to catch my eye yesterday – 39% of people under age 35 check Twitter 10 times a day, it (and the ensuing retweeting frenzy) declared. That’s quite a statement, yes?  I’ve never been one to take grandiose declarations at face value, so I decided to do a little digging (and a little quick and dirty debunking if it came to that).

It turns out that the survey referred to was conducted among 771 “online users*” by retrevo.com, an electronics e-commerce site. What the data actually indicates is that of the 771 individuals who participated in the survey, 39% of those who are BOTH under 35 (and retrevo doesn’t provide an  age or sex breakdown of their data or a mention of methodology, just a vague reassurance that  “the sample size was 771 distributed across gender, age, income and location in the United States.”) AND Twitter users claimed to check the site more than 10 times a day. But when you also account for the fact that only 11% of American adults actually use Twitter or another similar microblogging service in the first place (this number is approx. 20% for  the 18-35 year-old cohort, though) and other research that indicates that 38% of Twitter “users”  have never sent a single tweet and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets, the 39% heavy users stat loses a lot of its exclamation-worthy oomph. Indeed, initial pearl clutching (or fist bumping) over the masses of  Gen Yers potentially at risk for social media “addiction” (retrevo’s word, not mine) no longer seems warranted.  Pin meet balloon.

If I wanted to be highbrow, I might archly dismiss a lot of the current statistics-happy hype over social media as a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  But true to my Gen Y roots, I’ll opt to compare it to the scene in Home Alone where an adorably ingenious little Macaulay Caulkin jury-rigged a couple of mannequins and a life-sized Michael Jordan cutout in order to convince the casual observer that his empty living room was the site of a truly rocking holiday bash.

* Retrovo has since confirmed that these users were not Retrovo customers and updated the report to reflect this.