Majority Of Twitter Users Fail To Continue Tweeting
Despite Twitter’s growing pop culture status, a new Harvard study shows that more than 90 percent of its content appears to be driven by about 10 percent of its users.
Additionally, most Twitter members have only tweeted once since joining the popular online community, said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School, who led the research team.
With estimates of more than 10 million users, experts believe that Twitter is the fastest-growing social network.
Researchers studied the activity of 300,542 Twitter users. They found that more than half of people on the micro blogging site updated their page less than once every 74 days.
"Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it," said Heil.
Heil said that the top 10 percent of users on typical online social networks produced 30 percent of the total content.
"This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," researchers concluded.
Twitter’s recent growth has been massive. Nielsen Online estimates that the number of visitors to the micro blogging site jumped 1,382 percent, from 475,000 in February 2008 to seven million in February 2009.
Popular social network Facebook is estimated to have grown in population by 228 percent during the same observational period.
A study released by Nielsen Online earlier this year showed that more than 60 percent of Twitter users in the US failed to keep up with the site one month after joining.
"The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently," Heil told BBC News.
Among other findings, the Harvard research team showed that male Twitter users had 15 percent more followers than women, although the Twitter population is made up of more women than men.
"The sort of content that drives men to look at women on other social networks does not exist on Twitter," said Heil.
"By that I mean pictures, extended articles and biographical information."
"Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends," he said.
"It looks like a few people are creating content for a few people to read and share."
"The Twitter management need to decide if this is a problem, and if they decide it is, how they will tweak Twitter to become more acceptable to the average user?"
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Image Credit: Twitter
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