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Twitter’s 10/90 Split
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Steve Smith

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Twitter may be more of a spectator sport than we thought. The top 10% most frequent posters of tweets to the microblog service are responsible for 90% of the volume on the network. In fact the median number of lifetime tweets per Twitter users is one, say researchers at the Harvard Business Review. Twitter behaviors are quite different from usage patterns on other social networks where the top 10% most active users are responsible for only 30% of content production. At the HBR blog, researchers Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piporski say that the statistic “implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

Twitter users do like to watch, however. In this social media network, 80% of users are followed by or follow at least one person. On other social networks 60% to 65% of users typically have at least one friend in the system. Men have 15% more followers than women and they also have more reciprocal relationships on Twitter. And unlike other social networks, both men and women are more likely to follow other male posters, while most other networks tend to focus on content produced by women.

The stats all point to the notion that Twitter is perceived by users more as a content broadcast medium than as a one-to-one exchange or a typical community building tool.

These stats raise some interesting questions about conventional advice surrounding Twitter and publishing. Most experts eschew feeding article links into a Twitter profile and encourage personal posts that invite interactivity. But if only 10% of the audience really is interacting while the rest are happy to lean back and watch, does this conventional wisdom still hold true? The full results of the HBR researchers is available at their blog.
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