TO: High-Level Business Executives
FROM: The Executive Whisper
When it comes to Twitter, who will be the small boy who yells out, “But the emperor has nothing on!”? To our strategy clients, we play the role of the boy. For the rest of the world, the Harvard Business Review appears to be taking on that role (we hope). In an online report titled “Men follow men and Nobody Tweets,” HBR reports that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets [its emphasis].” It gets better.
To retweet from HBR’s published report:
“On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”
That may have been more than 140 characters. But you get the tweet.
And in case you didn’t click on the link. Here’s another nice tweet about Twitter from the folks in Cambridge:
“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.”
To pile on: A study released Monday from the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) states that 18 to 26 year olds don’t see value in Twitter, although they spend hours daily texting friends and communicating on social networks in real time. Only 22% of Millennials use Twitter.
Um, not good.
Yet, is there a place for Twitter in our lives? Sure. For one, it’s a great way to follow celebrities du jour without having to buy People, Us or In Touch. Real-time gossip about Brangelina. Now that’s value.
[...] reports no numbers or research. And it conveniently ignores recent data revealing how Twitter’s traffic has flatlined and that basically no one tweets. Oh, and it’s lower on the social media interaction scale [...]
I think that the study would be more interesting if you removed the accounts that have less than 5 total tweets from the equation. Additionally, just because the account holder isn’t contributing to the noise doesn’t mean that they aren’t getting benefit from following others. I would also be interested in knowing click-through rates on any links that are posted in a tweet — are links here generating more traffic than we realize? Dell’s $1 million in sales from Twitter users last year must count for something.
Isn’t that kind of tweaking the data to fit your desired result? You know the Cubs would be in much better shape if you eliminated the games they play against teams above .500. Seriously, Matt, you do make good points. Thanks. We’ll see.
It totally is tweaking the data, but sometimes data is better understood in context.
Looking forward to the next article.