Facts About Twitter
Hi Guys!
This is another reblog post I want to share to you all. It’s quite interesting, though, since Twitter now become… ummm, happening? :D
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By Dava Castillo 
There are an estimated 200 million Twitter users.
October 1, 2011--
Researchers are first to admit Twitter is still new in terms of years of service to be analyzed. Still, reports are becoming available about Twitter users and their habits.
PsyBlog has gathered statistics and attempts to answer some questions you might find interesting.
A 2009 Pew Research found there are 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users Tweet or use a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).
Social Times reported in February of 2011 there are 200 million Twitter accounts.
Twitter began in 2006 and psychologists have compiled some early research suggesting it is a social network like nothing previously developed, and the credit goes to a young inventor.
Jack Dorsey et al invented Twitter. He is an American software architect and was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35. Mr. Dorsey abandoned his studies at New York University and moved to California in 2005. He met Biz Stones in a small company he had initially worked for in California. Biz had the same ideas of a network that connected people as well. Together they made a working prototype of Twitter. By 2006 Evan Williams joined them as well, and Twitter was launched in April of 2006.
So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about a 140 character limit transmission?
Characteristics of Tweeting
Messages are short and broadcasted quickly and easily like a fast paced conversation or like being at party and talking to multiple groups of people at the same time.
Many conversations are all going on at the same time and much of the information is simply repeated (retweeted). One of the detractors of this process is messages are corrupted overtime as people re-evaluate, re-interpret or misinterpret the meaning of the original tweet.
People join Twitter to follow their friends After a year, network analysis reported that people joined Twitter because their friends were with the networks resembling cell phones. The increase in users of Twitter reflects the growth of the internet with people using technology when services are free. Most tweets resembles low level conversation
This is not academic research, but does give some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter. An analytics company categorized 2,000 tweets collected over one week and developed six categories (similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):
Pointless babble: 41%
Conversational: 38%
Pass-along value: 9%
Self-promotion: 6%
Spam: 4%
News: 4%
What they call 'pointless babble' might better be called social pleasantries, social grooming or at least just babble. Like when someone says "How are you?" and you say "Fine." It may be low-level, but it's not pointless.
The average age of Tweeter is 31
The average (median) age for a Twitter user is 31, older than the median MySpace user who is 26, but younger than Facebook which is now 33. LinkedIn has the oldest users with the median being 39. Predictably the strongest growth in Twitter use is amongst those aged 18-24 (Pew, 2009).
Twitter leaders
Heil & Piskorski (2009) found that there were slightly more women than men on Twitter (55% women), but on average, men had 15% more followers than women, with men twice as likely to follow another man as they were a woman, and women 25% more likely to follow men. Both men and women, however, were found to tweet at the same rate.
Gender differences point out that psychologically men and women are very similar. But perhaps there's something about Twitter that on average fits slightly more with men.
Pixelposition offers a possible answer. “Tweeple, people who ‘tweet’ on Twitter, need to communicate in “messages” that are 140 characters or less. Men, in general, have fewer words in their vocabulary. Studies show men have approximately 1/4 to 1/3 the number of words in their ‘verbal arsenal’ compared to a woman’s verbal capacity. This begs the question…
Does Twitter’s 140-character limitation favor men, since they use fewer words?
20 per cent are 'informers', 80 per cent are 'meformers'
After examining 350 messages collected from Twitter, Naaman (2010) found two different types of user:
Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users
Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.
Informers tended to have larger social networks. The differences hint at the various ways people use Twitter. The conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated because 80 percent don't reply to others; therefore, it's not that social. If not social, then what is it? This is a curious aspect of Twitter spelling out the need to broadcast one’s activities without expecting a response, or perhaps the possibility of seeking responses.
Trends are one-time and short-lived
Tweets on a particular topic (Twitter trends) rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days (Kwak et al., 2010). Most topics only trend once, and then die, usually never to return. 85% percent of these trends are news-related. For citizen journalism this is encouraging news.
Average tweet frequency is 1
The average (median) lifetime number of tweets for a Twitter user is 1 (Heil & Piskorski, 2009). This means most people who sign up are just following others or don't use it at all. This begs the question if 200 million Tweeters is really a valid description of number of users.
Heil & Piskorski report that 10% percent of Twitter users contribute 90% percent of the tweets. Most of the Twitter users are following celebrities because of the “halo effect.”
“The 'halo effect' is a classic finding in social psychology. It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgments about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent). Hollywood stars demonstrate the halo effect perfectly. Because they are often attractive and likeable we naturally assume they are also intelligent, friendly, display good judgment and so on. That is, until we come across (sometimes plentiful) evidence to the contrary. Some politicians are also in this category.”
Existential angst can motivate users
Twitter is often uncharitably said to be perfect for our narcissistic age. It enables people to gather followers, talk about themselves, all without having to listen to anyone else.
A small study conducted by Qiu et al. (2010) has suggested that amongst the extroverted it really is “existential angst” that motivates tweeting. The same wasn't found, though, for those who weren't so extroverted.
The Psych blogger, however, says “Twitter is simply fun and easy to use, and you don’t have to say much and is not as obsessive as Facebook and other social networks that is gathering information about you.”
Twitter is less social and more informational
Support for the idea that Twitter is more informational and less social than other social networks comes from Johnson and Yang (2009; PDF) who found that people treat other Twitter users primarily as interesting information sources.
It was discovered that people gained the most gratification from information they had found through Twitter. The social aspect of it, however, participants didn't find particularly gratifying, despite a positive expectation.
Network analysis also tends to play down the social aspects of the site. Twitter shows relatively low levels of reciprocity compared with other social networking sites. Only 22% percent of Twitter users have reciprocal links between them, compared with 68% on Flickr and 84% on Yahoo! 360.
Kwak et al. (2010) found that the average path length is 4.12 with 93.5% of people within 5 or fewer hops of everyone else. This is mostly because Twitter is dominated by a small number of celebrities, making many more big nodes than would be expected in a social network.
Redeeming Social Value of Twitter
Hughes and Palen (2009) looked at the use of Twitter in mass and emergency events. Tweets during two hurricanes and two political conventions suggested that people are increasingly using Twitter to share information with each other that is time sensitive and evolving quickly.
Twitter is perfect for a crisis when information needs to be moved quickly and efficiently around social networks. Indeed researchers can detect emergency events like earthquakes by monitoring Twitter (Sakaki et al., 2010).
Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analyzed their emotional content, and produced a 'mood of the nation' video. It shows how the emotional content of people's tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive): It shows that tweets become exceedingly negative as the day progresses. One explanation might be the proliferation of negative news events developing during the day.
Conclusion
Twitter is still in its infancy in terms of longevity, and its growth in five years has been significant, which is an indicator from a business perspective that it will be around for a while. Most people join Twitter because their friends do and the unique platform facilitates inviting friends to follow you. More men use Twitter than women, and research suggests that the 140 character limit might be the reason why because men in general prefer to use less words. The majority of tweets are pleasantries or conversational, with the use of it as a news outlet being the least at a mere 4% percent.
Studies suggest the “speaking” aspect of twitter, rather than “listening” has an appeal with only 20% of Tweeters expecting or even wanting a reply while 80% percent were broadcasting information about themselves.
In the future, it will be fascinating to see how Twitter evolves and whether the social characteristics or the immediacy of transmission of informational news becomes the primary focus of its existence in the world of emerging technologies.
Dava Castillo is based in Clearlake, California, United States of America, and is an Anchor for Allvoices***
Well, I put my attention on this:
Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.Which one is you? :D
~ Cheers
