Harvard Research Shows Only Small Percent Active On Twitter

In a recent study, researchers from Harvard sampled 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how they are using the micro-blogging service.

The findings showed that, despite a tremendous amount of media hype, the typical Twitter users seldom posts and that only a small percentage of users on the site are active. The researchers found that, 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.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.

In case you don’t know yet, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service, which began in 2006, that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.

The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.