Stunning New Numbers on Who Uses Twitter
Hot-off-the-presses research from Harvard Business School shows some very surprising data about who uses Twitter and how. Looking at 300,000 Twitter users, researchers found:
- Only 10% of users generate 90% of tweets. "This implies," according to the authors, "that Twitters resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."
- Silent majority. Over half of Twitter users communicate less than once every 74 days.
- Twitter men prefer other men. An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.
The researchers, MBA student Bill Heil and professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, called the male-heavy gender results "stunning" compared with activity on social networks, where women are typically more active then men. "Most of the activity is focused around women -- men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know," according to , according to Heil and Piskorski.
A lively debated has popped up on this research on Harvard Business Publishing, where the researchers lay out the results in the post New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets.
If these numbers hold as Twitter develops, what do they say about men and women and how they communicate? Is it surprising that so few Twitter accounts are actually active, or that 90 percent of Tweets comes from 10 percent of users?