The top 10 percent of prolific Twitter users account for over 90 percent of tweets, say researchers at Harvard Business School. So what does that mean? Maybe less than you would think.
Some will argue it shows Twitter actually isn't actually as popular as it seems. And at least one other study shows a very-high churn rate of new Tweeters.
"Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent," says David Martin, Nielsen Wireless VP.
Unless that churn rate changes, Twitter ultimately will reach only about 10 percent of Internet users, Nielsen Wireless predicts. A company, service or application cannot churn 60 percent a month and expect any different conclusion.
Twitter's big problem seems to be that so many people do not find it useful. The fact that 90 percent of Tweets come from 10 percent of users is in fact not surprising or unusual.
Others will suggest that the highly-skewed tweeting pattern means Twitter activity is more like a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. But something similar to this is true of blog posting as well. A small percentage of people supply most of the posts.
A typical social networking site might have the top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of all activity as well.
At Wikipedia, the top 15 percent of the most prolific editors account for 90
percent of Wikipedia's edits.
The point is that it is user churn, not the disparate distribution of tweets, that are of significance.
The Pareto principle, colloquially referred to as the "80-20 rule" or the "long tail,"
occurs widely in both human and natural domains.
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. That would not be unusual if tweets follow the Pareto rule, and they seem to.
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