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For all the recent headlines about Twitter and its huge increase in traffic, a new study out from Harvard Business School shows that the median number of lifetime tweets is…wait for it…one. (Sample size: 300,000.)
What’s not surprising is that Twitter has confirmed the 90-10 rule – 90% of the tweets are coming from just 10% of the users. That number is very similar to Wikipedia’s contribution model (and we’re all familiar with Wikipedia’s business model).
If Twitter is to be truly successful, it needs to get closer to a traditional social-networking authorship mix, which the study reports is closer to 30% of content authored by those prolific 10% of users. That may be difficult, though, if the authors’ description of Twitter as a one-way, one-to-many publishing service is accurate. That may be a glaring vulnerability in the nature (perceived or not) of the service.
Twitter users are broadcasting personal updates and ideas and thoughts to peers - practicing forms of personal branding - rather than practicing two-way, peer-to-peer communications, as many users do on social networks.
Twitter usage seems to diverge from social networks in other ways, as shown by some findings in the gender analysis: A man is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (this despite the fact that the study shows women at 55% of users, men at 45%).
They say that “these results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.” But the authors do note that social-network activity centers around women, due to photo sharing and more detailed biographies.
If Twitter does update its iconic interface to include usage beyond chronological text, it will begin to resemble other social networks (or cannibalize apps that have been written on its platform); if it doesn’t, it might just plateau at that one lifetime tweet, as users exhibit boredom and look for other services on the Now Web.
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