Who really uses Twitter? And why?

Jake Widman
Thursday, 04 June 2009 03:43

Your IT - Home IT

A review of the activities of 300,000 Twitter users conduced by members of the Harvard Business School found that 10 percent of Twitter users accounted for more than 90 percent of all the tweets.

By comparison, other social networks are more democratic: the top 10 percent of users account for just 30 percent of all the content.

The researchers cited Wikipedia as an online venue with a similar pattern of usage: on Wikipedia, 15 percent of the editors account for more than 90 percent of the content.

"In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool," the researchers concluded. "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."

In addition, most Twitter users barely participate at all. The median number of lifetime tweets per user is one, while 75 percent of users have tweeted just four times.

The Harvard researchers discovered some other insights about Twitter usage. Unlike most social networks, where women provide most of the activity, tweeting men have 15 percent more followers than women, even though women represent 55 percent of the service's members.

In addition, men are more than twice as likely to follow another man than to follow a woman, while women are 25 percent more likely to follow a man than a woman.

A venue in which a few contributors, mostly men, dominate the conversation doesn't sound like much of a social revolution. That may help explain last month's report that only 40 percent of U.S. Twitter users return the next month.