A Harvard Business School study estimates that only 10 percent of Twitter users generate 90 percent of its content.
Bill Heil, who conducted the study, said that with typical social networks, 10 percent of users create 30 percent of all content. “This implies”, he wrote in a blog post, “that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”
Micro-blogging Service Has Rapid Growth
Twitter is a social networking website that was launched in 2006. People can post messages of up to 140 characters - known as tweets – and these can be seen by other users who subscribe to their feed.
The service has grown rapidly and has become a favourite among media companies. Its growth has been fuelled by celebrity endorsements from the likes of Oprah Winfrey.
According to Mashable.com (January 9, 2009) the growth of Twitter, has been phenomenal: “…just how much did it grow in 2008? The final numbers are in, and according to Compete, they’re astounding: 752 percent, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December (2008).”
Meanwhile, BBC News (June 9, 2009) reported that, “Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network.”
In May 2009, Twitter was handed a Webby Award in the “Breakout of the Year Category.”
Study Says Twitter Use not as Widespread as Claimed
The team at Harvard University studied the activity of more than 300,000 Twitter users during the month of May 2009 to discover how people were using it.
The study found that Twitter’s usage patterns are unlike those of other on-line social networks. “A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”
BBC News reported on the study by pointing out that, “…most people only ever ‘tweet’ once during their lifetime, the researchers found. ‘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 carried out the work.”
Twitter Users Reluctant to Return
The market research company Nielsen confirms the findings of the Harvard study. In a report released on April 28, 2009, David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online, wrote that, “Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month…”
Mr. Martin added that this doesn't necessarily mean that Twitter will disappear because of a lack of users: “Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days.”
But, he said that even giants such as MySpace and Facebook did a better job of holding on to users in their early days.
