With Twitter having just passed its fifth birthday an interesting statistic has come out which throws some more light on how we use the micro blogging site.
There are more than 200 million users registered with Twitter and it is calculated that around 140 million tweets are sent every day. So that’s not far from being one tweet per person per day, is it? Not quite, actually. As fair and democratic as that sounds it seems as though the split between users is far more unbalanced that you might think.
The anoraks at Yahoo! have looked at a massive amount of tweets and discovered that a small band of users are responsible for around half of all the activity on Twitter. This group of people, known as elite users, amounts to roughly 20,000 and they send out about half of all tweets.
The analysis was carried out by looking at 260 million tweets which had been posted during the period between July 2009 and March of last year. While celebrities are people we follow most it turns out that media companies are behind a huge number of the Twitter output.
So it seems that the ordinary user doesn’t actually send that many tweets at all. There is no official word from the people at Twitter to tell us how many of these registered users are actually active, but it certainly seems that a lot of them either don’t use the site very often or follow other people’s messages rather than sending their own.
The Yahoo! Researchers conclude by stating that the user patterns of Twitter correspond more to something like the mass media than to other social networking sites such as Facebook. This is because people tend to follow others much more than they are actually followed. This lack of a reciprocal relationship is one of the features which differentiate the site from others around.
Are you an elite user on Twitter? Why on Earth do you send so many messages? If you aren’t an elite user then do you just follow rather than send tweets?
Source: The Telegraph
