Who is using Twitter and why?

There is an interesting Harvard Business Review article called
New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets
which has some interesting findings about the latest must have social media networking site. As we know, there is a huge amount of coverage of Twitter in the media at the moment, but a straw poll around the office shows that Facebook is still the networking site of choice for the serious networking kids.

Interestingly, the study found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.” This is compared to “a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.”  In other words, messages are being pushed by a very small amount of users, with most of the audience observing passively. If you look at it like that, and consider the very high penetration of twitter by celebrity and other well known figures, is Twitter any more than advertising?

The public nature of Twitter - ok, you have to approve followers, but do we honestly think that Stephen Fry personally knows his 546,405 followers - its seems to be more of a fansite than a social network. This is backed up by some extent by the Harvard study. “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.”

Average of one post? So either people don’t know how to use it - unlikely as it’s so simple - or the vast majority of people are just watching. Given that more women use Twitter than men - 55% to 45% - and women buy more celebrity magazines this is perhaps not surprising. It looks as if this is less of a true network, and really more of a way of getting your messaging out, even if it is often pretty inane. (Ashton Kutcher, please stand up).

Nothing wrong with that, but if it’s advertising, not networking, surely our business approach has to be different as well, treating it as a communication tool, rather than another form of network? Looking at the list of companies using Twitter (short sample list here) it would seem that many companies have come to the same conclusion, using rapid tweets to get information out quickly and painlessly to a captive and interested market. What will be interesting is how this develops over the next year. How will they make money? Will we still be twittering in a years time, or will it go the way of Friends Reunited?