Many men will tell you no. Polite women will concur. But is it true?

Add that ‘perception is reality’ (a concept I truly believe) can we be convinced something, anything, is bigger than it really is just because someone says it is?

These are thoughts that crossed my mind when I saw two recent posts; one related to twitter the other to ActiveRain, the real estate blogging platform.

Yesterday one of my favorite Websites, Business Insider, asked the question: “How many users does Twitter REALLY have?” The current number is around 175 million, according to the twitter ‘About’ page and it represents “registered users”. In trying to answer the question Business Insider put together this chart:

The chart uses data obtained via the twitter API that is “one month old”. They Looked at follower/following statistics to see how many users are following or are followed by a certain number of people.

The data shows:

• There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts
• There were 85 million accounts with one or more followers

Based upon this they claim that with “a little subtraction”:

• 56 million Twitter accounts follow zero other accounts
• 90 million Twitter accounts have zero followers

That makes the original number far less impressive. And so to ActiveRain. Last month Craig Snead, a ‘real estate investor’ from Michigan wrote a post: “It’s A Waterfall – Activerain Is Pouring In New Members.” In the post Craig points out:

“In the last twelve months, Active Rain membership has grown by 2,190 new members each month. That’s an average of 73 new members a day. Three new members every hour, 24-7. Now that [] sounds impressive.”

But is it? Please understand that I’m actually a huge fan of ActiveRain. I use their service, love its ease of use and the SEO benefits, leverage direct access to some amazingly intelligent and articulate people and really feel part of the community. If you are in real estate and want to blog there is no better starting place. But…if we think about the numbers for just a moment there are some problems.

1. The number, for twitter and ActiveRain, never seems to go down. Does that mean that once someone signs up for either service they become a dedicated and active (sorry…) lifetime client? Does no one look at twitter or ActiveRain and say “Nope, it’s just not for me!”

2. It’s no secret that hundreds of thousands of Realtors have left the industry in the last few years (See: NAR Annual Reports 2007 – 2011). So where are the new members coming from?

3. There are 8,619 ActiveRain ‘members’ in New York State. Over 5,000 of those members have under 1,000 points and 99% of those people haven’t created one blog post. That’s more than 60% of the total New York based member count. I’m sure that if I dug a little deeper, the number of people not posting a single article is a lot higher. Perhaps they just look? That’s not possible; you get 100 points for simply logging into ActiveRain so they would pass the 1,000 point mark very quickly. So how many people are actually using the platform?

A couple of years ago I asked that question during a conversation with an ex-ActiveRain employee, someone who had held a senior position at the company. Information from an ex-employee is never the best source for any business data but they told me the number of truly active ActiveRainers is a couple of thousand.

Which leads me to some questions:

Does any of this really matter?

Should we care that twitter and ActiveRain (and others) post numbers that suggest their communities are bigger than they really are?

Does size really matter?