Nobody Tweets--But Isn't That Normal?
- Entry by Tom Webster
- Jun. 2, 2009
- Permalink
A new study from Harvard examined a sample of over 300,000 users of Twitter to determine a few basic usage patterns and discovered, among other things, that 90% of the content on Twitter (the "tweets") are created by just 10% of Twitter users. The article makes the point that this ratio is fairly lopsided, especially when compared to the same ratio for other social networking sites, where 10% of users account for 30% of the content.
Twitter is at its heart, however, more of a "microblogging" service, so perhaps it's more appropriate to compare "Twittering" with blogging. If you look at this datapoint, from the most recent Edison/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia study, you'll note that the ratio is roughly the same, with 8% of those familiar with blogs indicating that they are "regular" bloggers:
Both Twitter and blogs involve the creation of content, but Twitter's 140-character constraint may actually facilitate that creation to a marginally higher degree.
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