Estimates suggest that the micro-blogging service Twitter now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network; however, despite the explosive hype surrounding it, research shows that a small percentage of users actually contribute to the vast majority of content.After probing exactly 300,542 Twitter accounts in May 2009, a Harvard Business School professor reported that 10 percent of the service's users produce more than 90 percent of the tweets.
In contrast, on other online social networks, the top 10 percent of users account for an average of around 30 percent of all production. That’s quite a stark difference, but why? To me, this implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way or “one-to-many” publishing service; as opposed to other social networking tools that represent a two-way, “peer-to-peer” communication network.
The study compliments recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen. Nielsen’s claim is that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Cooperatively, these findings suggest that, so far, Twitter has been a great deal better at signing up users than keeping them.
PROBLEM: the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one — when new people sign up for Twitter, they post once and then never return.
Twitter describes itself as a way to "communicate and stay connected" with "friends, family and co-workers". The team at Twitter needs to decide if this lack of member longevity is a problem. If they decide it is, they need to figure out how to spin Twitter into something more acceptable to the average Web 2.0 user.
