Twitter Trends

There is a new case study from harvard wherin they examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service and came up with some unique twitter trends

1. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other.”
   
2. An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
   
3. These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women — men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.
4. 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. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.
5. Of the users included in the researchers’ sample, 80 percent “are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development).”
6. “Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.”

This actually seems to suggest that while major social networks are about dating and friendships the use of twitter is more for information and as such it is an evlovement of news portals and blogs with them becoming more social rather than that of a generic social networks.Twitter is heavily populated by influencers and thus it is those group of people who are active the most and they are the ones who get followed the most also and it seems that most of this group is men only.