Twitter loyalty and Twitter statistics.

[greygirlbeast]

Some interesting Twitter data has been brought to my attention today. Chiefly, a new study by a researcher at the Harvard Business School (Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan. "Networks as covers: Evidence from an on-line social network.") which used a random sampling of 300,000 Twitter users during May of 2009. Among other things, the study shows that "...the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets," and that, in this respect, "...Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network." Here's a link to the online report on the study.

Pikorski finds "Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days." And there's some very intriguing stuff in this article on gender and Twitter.

Also, there's a piece at CNet on the lack of loyalty displayed by Twitter users towards the service, as compared to MySpace and Facebook: "Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth" by David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online.

Martin writes, "Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent."

Curious stuff. I also was unaware that Twitter got a 100% boost from an Oprah mention, though the boost doesn't appear to be translating into repeat offenders.

Comments

Being Followed

[robert-robbins.livejournal.com]

I have the mayor and the local newspaper following me now on Twitter. I have to be more careful in what I tweet. They must have read some business article on how important it is to use Twitter.

[brienze.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that researcher actually ever used Twitter, instead of just crunching numbers. The median number of posts is 1 because of the huge number of robots and spam accounts, whose only purpose for existing is to follow other people. This generates the "you are being followed by XYZ" notification, which they're hoping people click on to read the one entry about this great weight loss plan or miracle drug to make their dick bigger.

As with LJ, there is a fair amount of following famous or famously funny people, so the one-to-many observation is valid, but they'd have to weed out the not-actual-users to make any statistically meaningful conclusions.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

but they'd have to weed out the not-actual-users to make any statistically meaningful conclusions.

I do recall one or another of the articles mentioning how "spam" accounts grossly inflated the account numbers.

[ardiril.livejournal.com]

Also, the spam accounts are quite benign. They're just followers. You can completely ignore them because unless you follow them back, they cannot contact you. Further, if their ratio of following to followers reaches a threshold, Twitter deletes their account.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

"...Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service. . . "

Cf. my comment in your previous post.

[spiritualmonkey.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine once said "The difference between Twitter & LJ is the difference between knowing what someone is doing, and what they're thinking."

Twit Vid

[faustfatale.livejournal.com]

Here's a very interesting video about Twitter.

http://blog.booksquareuniversity.com/twitter/the-truth-about-twitter/

Re: Twit Vid

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

Thank for the link. I watched. But, truthfully, this didn't tell me much I didn't already know, and it certainly didn't change my feelings about the service.