We're all on Twitter, but nobody tweets

By Yvonne Buma on 21 September 2009

Off course this statement is an exaggeration. Sorry!  But recently I stumbled upon an interesting research by Harvard about how people use Twitter. The researchers questioned over 300,000 Twitter users and found that most Twitter users are merely followers. Half of Twitter users tweet once very 74 days, 25% of the users never tweet and 10% of Twitter users account for over 90% of tweets. This is an even smaller percentage than people contributing 90% to Wikipedia (15%). In the comments on second state of dutchtwitosphere you will find similar numbers on the Twitter users in The Netherlands: “50% of the Dutch Twitter accounts have less then 12 updates. 5% of the Dutch Twitter accounts have more then 550 updates”.

The researchers conclusion is therefore that Twitter is more of a one-way, broadcasting tool than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. Guess we knew this. However, used in this way it can be very effective, as we have seen during the Obama campaign. But also for commercial reasons Twitter can be very effective as the case of the computer company Dell shows. They have been active on Twitter for the past two years and made more than one million dollars on Twitter sales in half a year (total over the two years is three million dollars). Not bad. They post about 6 – 19 times a week on Dell Outlet and almost every post includes a link to a sale (about half are Twitter-exclusive deals). On YouTube they explain how and why. Another nice example is a New Orleans based pizza company. They use Twitter locally and their sales have gone up 20%. Dutch companies are slowly following these examples with Telfort and UPC in the lead. Will others follow?

By the way: another interesting bit of information derived from the Harvard study: it seems that on Twitter men are mainly interested in men (65% of them only follow tweets by other men). Is it really a men’s world?

tagged with: twitter, social media

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