Twitter Users And 90% Of Them Being Inactive – A Harvard Research Report

A Harvard study conducted recently has brought some very interesting, yet controversial Twitter statistics to the limelight. Keeping that aside for a moment, if you look at the numbers from Compete for the month of May, it gives some very surprising results. It looks as if Twitter has finally crossed its hype cycle, as its phenomenal growth rate (7 million unique visits in February!) finally seems to have come down, yet YouTube and Facebook have been attracting an ever increasing global audience.

Coming back to the Harvard study, it has been found that a very tiny fraction of 10% users generate the content for the 90% of its users! The study analysed 300,000 random Twitter profiles. Mikolaja Jan Piskorski, who led the research, states that more than 50% of users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.

Apart from these, Hubspot has also revealed a more extensive study covering 4.5 million accounts and the findings further strengthen the previous conclusions. Here are some of the main points:

• 75.86% of people have no bio in their profile
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted. Not even once!
• 52.71% have no followers

It does like pretty bad eh? Especially when you consider the fact that companies and brand are increasingly using Twitter to improve feedback and conversations with their consumers. This is also a conclusive fact that the 2.0 Web is more about consuming information, rather than creating your own content. True, every social media platform has its creators but the number of people listening to those creators outnumbers them by a large margin!

“If you’re trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you’re probably better off staying away from Twitter,” the researchers said in an interview.

Personally, I think that these stats are not really that bad. Here’s why.

• You can be a power Twitter user, without ever getting followers or updating yourself. There are hundreds of profiles out there, who only listen to news sites and journalists etc. to get instant updates!
• So, Hubspot has marked an account inactive only if these three conditions are satisfied; less than 10 followers, less than 10 friends and less than 10 updates.

If you take this definition into account, only 9.06% of users are inactive, which for me is brilliant! Of course, there are the usual Twitter bots and spam accounts in this figure, which I bet are compensated by power users who tweet more than 100 times a day. Closing deal, I think Twitter is one of the most versatile tools and cannot be written down because of some studies, we gotta look at the big picture.; the big picture of how it’s entering our lives, how it’s affecting distribution of media and how companies interact with their audience.