A recent Harvard Business School study showed that a small percentage of Twitter users tweet… then the blogs exploded. Fortunately, after the initial “See why Twitter is doomed” posts, some good commentary focused on understanding the reason for the numbers.
What we should expect from Twitter use hinges on the extent to which it is a conversation versus a broadcast platform. There is a great article on this here: link. My initial inclination is to say that Twitter is more of a broadcast platform because a lot of use centers around events and news. Musicians and celebrities have found Twitter extremely useful for connecting with fans. This is because they usually have announcements many people are interested in. Unfortunately they can’t write back to all 1M of their followers if they respond. (This means you Ashton Kutcher! Why won’t you reply to my tweets?!)
I personally tend to use Twitter to send messages to a certain group of people in my social network. These friends are primarily marketers and entrepreneurs in the tech space. My twitter graph is more like a small focused community rather than a general broadcasting space. This is one reason I post updates to Twitter more than Facebook. My Facebook account isn’t yet set up to reach particular audiences based on interest.
We can look to the past to understand Twitter’s future
The main reason the Twitter research results should not be surprising is past online community studies. When analyzing the frequency of comments posted on blogs, a pattern known as the 90-9-1 rule was found. This means that for an online community
- 90 % of users are views
- 9 % are moderate contributors
- 1% are heavy contributors
But we also know a rule called the 80-20 rule. This suggests that 20% of your users create all the content. Link
The answer for Twitter is its in a ballpark somewhere in between. As I have graphed below, the reason for differences in participation rates depends on at least 2 main factors. These are:
- Privacy of the community
- Ease of participation
As privacy gets higher, the community usually gets smaller and participants are more likely to post. Small communities with focused target markets often get higher participation and user loyalty.
Ease of participation is very straightforward. The lower the effort to participate, the more people will contribute. This is obvious when you think about the number of people who write blog posts versus the number that update their Facebook status. Link.
We see from this simple diagram that the 90-10-1 and 80-20 rules make up frontiers based on the 2 parameters. Although numbers are not exact, a visual reference lets us put the report results in perspective. By comparing services, we see that Twitter is not really unusual. Participation falls between Facebook status updates and writing Blog posts. It would be interesting to know if smart phone adoption is raising participation levels since it lowers the effort required to contribute to online communities.
So if you are starting your own online community or service, do not get caught off guard by your analytics. Make sure to form realistic expectations based of research and focus on more pressing problems, such as growth rates and a business model that works.
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