Twitter's top-heavy dilemma

Twitter is a monster in social media, but there is some growing concern that the platform might be too reliant on its most loyal users. About 10 percent of Twitters users generate more than 90 percent of the content on the site, the BBC reports, citing a new Harvard study.

At 10 million users now, Twitter is growing faster than any other social network, according to the BBC, but more than half of all people using the platform update their page less than once every 74 days. Worse yet, the majority of users surveyed only tweet once during their lifetime.

Harvard studied 300,000 users, so it's not entirely comprehensive, but the results fall in line with the growing number of studies that indicate Twitter interest falls off rapidly for most new users.

 

Comments

Brian Carter
Brian Carter June 11, 2009 at 9:37 AM

Hey Matt, when you look at the demographics by age group of content producers vs. content consumers, this is less shocking. Doncha think we're still largely a couch potato TV nation, even tho more people are producing content in World 2.0?

I wonder what the numbers are on who is "listening" to all the tweeting- that's impossible to measure without Twitter's private analytics. Twitter definitely doesn't work as communications if everyone's tweeting but no one is reading. @replies are where it's... at. ;-) We can measure that, which would be an interesting follow up to this. :-)