One item in this morning’s in box caused me to look twice – eMarketer, using numbers from Nielsen, stated that “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up.”

Turns out it caught the eye of Jim Jansen at Penn State as well. After a quick and flurried Twit-Talk with my friend Jim, we both agreed the title’s misleading.

If you continue to read down to the fourth paragraph, you start to find the article begins to refute itself:

“The decrease in visitors could mean either falling interest in Twitter or simply migration to other platforms, such as third-party applications and mobile access. ”

Well..duh! Through the rest of the post, eMarketer starts to show just how much Twitter traffic has migrated to 3rd party platforms. As Jim said in a tweet “Don’t even know why they are reporting it like this.” Why indeed? This is just sloppy and misleading. It’s one thing to attract eyeballs from the email in box (worked with me) but it’s another to falsely or misleadingly report research and drop the real picture down to the bottom of the post. I’ve seen enough eye tracking to know that the majority of readers would never get past the first paragraph or two.

Shame on you eMarketer!