Proof: Twitter Is More Publication Than Conversation

On Twitter, most people aren’t conversing or creating. They’re following and reading what a few prolific people share. Here’s the proof.

NOBODY TWEETS

Harvard Business Review highlighted two different studies over the past year found that most people on Twitter are not updating their status.

In one study, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski of Harvard Business School 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.

A separate study by Max Planck Institute for Software Systems found similar results. The study lead, Meeyoung Cha, said

We were surprised by how only a fraction of Twitter users actively tweet. And this small fraction of Twitter users provoke responses (mentions) and initiate information cascades (retweets). I guess many people use Twitter to browse others’ messages rather than generating a lot [sic] new messages themselves.

It seems that NielsenNetWire was right to predict that social networking would become the “next great gateway to content discovery.”

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

For Twitter, we should think less conversation and more publication of content.
In any publication, an element of relationship—and consequently conversation—between the reader / audience and publisher exists. But, we do need to stop thinking of and planning for Twitter as if everyone is eager to converse. They’re eager to follow and eager for good content. If you’re trying to reach people through Twitter and don’t publish or curate good content, you’re in trouble.

We need to think carefully about how to measure influence on Twitter.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve run into several friends or colleagues who commented very specifically on my tweets. I was shocked and delighted. I had no idea those folks noticed because they had never responded over Twitter (not even with a measurable retweet). How can we capture that type of influence?