Who Gives a Tweet?
The recently published research out of Harvard (and by our MPD colleague and head of MPD’s Social Strategy Practice Misiek Piskorski) has generated lots of controversy over that social media tidal wave known as Twitter. His research, which observed more than 300,000 users in May of 2009 revealed that the vast majority of tweets are heard by very few people, and 90% of all activity is generated by 10% of the users. Among twitterers, the median number of lifetime tweets is a mere one and nearly 75% of users only tweet four times and 80% either follow or are followed by one other user. This is in contrast to other social networks in which 10% of the activity is generated by only 30% of the population and the number of friends in the network is a lot larger than 1!
His conclusions also suggest that Twitter is unlike other social networks in another important way: people don’t follow women, in spite of the fact that most twitter accounts are held by women. In most social networks, activity is generated by both men and women following women they know and don’t know; in the world of Twitter, men follow men and women follow men, but few men or women follow women.
His general conclusion is that Twitter is an interesting broadcast one-to-many medium where marketers can use the channel to blast out messages and other promotional offers, but that it fails as a true social media where the goal is to engage others in a two or multi-way conversation.
At a dinner in London earlier this week, the discussion of this research generated a lot of interesting opinions, with many around the table dismissing the research findings as not representative of what they themselves have experienced on Twitter. Could be that those around the table are part of the 10%, while others have already acknowledged that Twitter is really just another form of broadcast media, and a low cost one at that, and use it for what it is.
Okay, to follow that thread, broadcast media is all about using content to bait an audience. But, is Twitter really effective at doing that? If the producers of content are small, and the number of followers each Twitter user has is also small, Oprah and Ashton Kucher notwithstanding, what are brands really gaining? In other words, is the juice worth the tweet?
Your thoughts? For mine, just follow me on twitter : )
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Digital Media, New Business Models, Technology, blogs, Social Networks, consumers, Web 2.0, Internet, two-sided market
Karen, I’m trying to break the 10% rules; now following you (a woman) on Twitter. Promise to read all your tweets - or at least those I see when I happen to be looking.
We need more Dereks!
I had no idea the majority of the people I’m following are men, but you’re 100% correct! Will have to redress that immediately!
That said, on average (with those I am following only), men appear to tweet more frequently than women, by a factor of 4 or 5. Any thoughts on why that might be?
I do agree that Twitter “fails as a true social media where the goal is to engage others in a two or multi-way conversation.” I can count on one hand the number of people who respond to questions and engage.
First, thanks, Michael for following me on Twitter! I will try to tweet often and with interesting updates!
One of the theories about social networks and those who produce content on social networks is that, in general, people tend to produce content for people they know more frequently than people they dont know. In fact, the Twitter study referenced in my blog had that as one of its hypotheses. It may be that women are more interested in producing content for people they know (e.g. friends/colleagues) than for people they dont know since women may actually use their content to engage with those friends/colleagues. Since Twitter is a medium for broadcasting and not exchange, that may be one plausible reason and why women are much more active on Facebook.
In any case, it is fascinating, don’t you think?