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"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often.
by SolaceQuantum 8y ago
"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. And these most active tweeters are much more likely than others to say they post about political issues. Fully 69% of the top 10% most prolific tweeters say they have tweeted about politics, compared with 39% of Twitter users generally. And 42% say they have tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with just 13% of other users.
The Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...."
I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.
- taborj 8y agoAnd especially alarming when combined with this: " In fact, this analysis estimates that the top 10% of tweeters are responsible for 80% of the tweets created by all U.S. adults on Twitter."
- RickS 8y agoMeh. Flipped another way, "90% of people in the US with twitter accounts don't post much if ever, and that long tail makes up 20% of twitter's US content" Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
- overcast 8y agoIs this unexpected? Just like anywhere. 10% of the people are doing 90% of the work.
- rootusrootus 8y agoHeck, don't we even have a name for it because it happens all the time? Pareto distribution.
- RickS 8y ago> using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
- bartread 8y agoI imagine there's some use of tools like Hootsuite (allows you to schedule tweets) in there as well. I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.