Studies Show Low Twitter Use Despite High Membership
New reports on the activities of Twitter users are revealing how little content the vast majority of the social network’s population actually contributes.
A report from analytics firm HubSpot showed that almost 55 percent of 4.5 million Twitter users have yet to post a single Tweet.
Additionally, more than half of its users have no followers, and 55 percent of them aren’t following any other users.
The HubSpot report’s findings coincide with those of a Harvard Business School report issued on Tuesday that studied the activity of 300,542 Twitter users to find 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 Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School, who led the research team.
"Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one."
"This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-too-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," Harvard 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 slightly more women than men.
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