Only 10pct of Twitter users do all the tweeting
By ANISaturday, June 6, 2009
LONDON - A meagre 10 percent of total Twitter users post 90 per cent of all tweets on the micro-blogging website, reveals a Harvard Business School report.
And it is the prolific Twitter users, like Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore, who account for the majority of tweets.
Led by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, the study looked at a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users during May 2009.
The findings are quite different from the usage patterns on other social networks, such as Facebook.
The top 10 per cent of Facebook users account for only 30 per cent of all content, i.e. three times less than the amount of content created by the top tweeters.
“This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the Telegraph quoted the report as saying.
Even Wikipedia-the free online user-edited encyclopaedia-has a similar usage pattern, with 15 per cent of its members creating 90 per cent of all page edits.
The Harvard report also reveals that a typical Twitter user only tweets once in their Twitter lifetime.
The finding supports evidence from a different study, which found that half of all users abandon their accounts after one month.
Twittering patterns also vary according to gender-men are apparently more likely to reciprocate their followers’ friendship compared to women and tend to have 15 per cent more followers. They are twice as likely to follow other men too.
On the other hand, women are 25 per cent more likely to follow a man than a woman, despite there being slightly more females on Twitter than men.
The latest study could not explain the different gender ratios.
However, Twitter’s most popular user happens to be male-Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, who recently passed the 2million-follower mark.
US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres is Twitter’s most popular female with 1.7m followers. (ANI)
