At the end of last month, Erik Schonfeld of TechCrunch noticed a Sysomos report that included the graph above.  He noted that it gives evidence to an important trend.  People tend to pick up their use of Twitter, months after they first start.  Schonfeld, explains this by suggesting that people sign-up out of curiosity, get confused/overwhelmed, and then take a few months to find enough friends and get comfortable enough to become prolific.  I’m going to go ahead and buy his theory, which leads me to follow up question.  What’s that mean for Twitter?  What does it mean for businesses that market on Twitter?

For Twitter it’s a good thing and a bad one.  It means that a hefty percentage of the people who sign-up for the service eventually become regular, theoretically monetizeable customers.  The bad news is it takes them months to do that.  I believe this will begin to fade naturally.  When people join now and run their google contacts through Twitter’s database, they’re a whole lot more likely to find a few matches then they were a few months ago; and not nearly as likely as they will be a few months from now.  They’re also more likely to already be familiar with Twitter and/or short messaging or microblogging (through Facebook or texting or any number of other places).  Twitter, for their part, is taking a few steps that will shorten the adoption lag for each user.  They are setting up sites that are tailored to specific types of users and providing detailed instructions and case studies (I wrote about the site for media users a few days ago).  They’re trying to integrate things like URL shortening and mobile clients more seamlessly.  These steps and others along with the natural reasons discussed will hopefully reduce the adoption gap.

In the mean time though, what does the adoption gap mean for businesses trying to market on Twitter?  It means that there is definitely a “dip” (to borrow a term from Seth Godin’s book).  What I mean by this, is that advertising on Twitter is not going to bring instant gratification.  You will likely experience some of the confusion/frustration that comes with being a new Twitter user and you will need to power through it.  The quicker you can get in to the veteran category, the better.  Additionally, your users will have this same learning curve.  You are likely going to need to be their champion.  Helping bring them along, and showing them what Twitter can do.  Reach out to your more novice followers, bring them together with your more vetran ones.  Overall, this adoption gap is an opportunity to build a community around your business, if you’re willing to put in the effort.