Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter users don’t actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible for over 90% of all Tweets.

According to the research, conducted on a random sample of about 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009, 25% of Twitter users don’t tweet at all, while 50% of users tweet less than once every 74 hours. Active users, on the other hand, tweet a lot, which makes Twitter a lot more like Wikipedia than an average social network (see graph below, courtesy of HBR).

Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information. Although it doesn’t necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period.

A separate study by Twitterati, young people don’t like Twitter.

They prefer social networks. The survey by Pace University and the Participatory Media Network found that 22% of people between 18 and 24-years-old had a Twitter account while 99% had a social network profile.

Of the young folks using Twitter, 85% of them follow friends, 54% follow celebrities, 29% follow family members and 29% follow companies.

"It may mean that younger people get their “micro fix” from text-messaging and SMS as opposed to Twitter. It could suggest Twitter hasn’t trickled down to this particular demographic just as it took some time for Facebook to gain traction among older people after being the hot platform for university students."