Twitter ye not
We’ve had the hype of celebs I can’t even be bothered to name helping raise the profile of Twitter, and now we’re getting the research that says Twitter ‘aint necessarily all it is cracked up to be. If, that is, it is cracked up to be a near-ubiquitous two-way chit-chat thing.
Two studies have passed my consciousness in as many days which tell me Twitter simply isn’t the conversational stunner some chatterati think it is.
A couple of researchers at Harvard Business School have taken a look at a random sample of 300,542 Twitterers and found that the most prolific ten percent of them account for a massive 90 percent of all tweets.
The researchers also have something to say about gender and following. Read their press release for the full gen, but I’d like to point out that deciding if someone is male or female by cross referencing their ‘real name’ against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names doesn’t strike me as totally reliable.
Anyway, on with the matter in hand.
The Harvard researchers suggest twitter is a one-to-many communications medium rather than a peer-to-peer one.
The view seems to be supported by Purewire, a Web security company that has launched something called TweetGrade. TweetGrade asses your reach and influence in the Twitter community. The grading system runs from F to A+. You just pop your user name into the Web page and it’ll compute your grade.
Anyway, the point is, Purewire has released its own research which suggests that 40 percent of Twitter users have not tweeted since their first day on the service, 25 percent are not following anyone, 50 percent follow fewer than five people, 75 percent follow fewer than ten people.
These stats were arrived at by crawling more than seven million Twitter user accounts and a sample of each user’s tweets, then analysing the data looking at things like the frequency of tweets and user to user interactions.
Other interesting stats are that almost 80 percent of Twitter users have fewer than ten tweets, 30 percent of users have no followers, 80 percent have fewer than ten followers.
What does all this mean?
Well, the inference is that Twitter is most often used as an information distribution medium rather than as one for exchanging views. But within the global community with its big trends there are, I am sure, lots of little communities who use Twitter as a two-way communications medium and share information and views about all sorts of things.
Which reminds me. Must away and tweet to my followers what I had for dinner last night. The three of them are probably dying to know.