Twitter Hype, Meet The Numbers

With microblogging platform Twitter taking the world by storm in the past year (give or take) and reaching an almost obscene level of media presence in the past few months, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that tweeting was somehow going to change the world, one-hundred and forty characters at a time. In fact, Time Magazine said as much in their cover story on Twitter this month.

Not so fast, Twitter boosters. A few recent studies claim to have crunched the numbers, and the results ain't pretty: the big headline from a Harvard study out this week is that only 10% of Twitter users produce more than 90% of tweets, meaning that the vast majority of the site's estimated ten million-plus users almost never use the service. Compare this to the typical online social network where the top 10% of users account for 30% of content, and the so-called "explosive" growth of Twitter starts to sound like what many have suspected all along: kinda-sorta but not entirely true.The Harvard study found that over half of all Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. The numbers speak for themselves.

Another study by HubSpot paints an even more vivid snapshot:

• 55.5% of users are not following anyone

• 54.9% have never tweeted

• 52.7% have no followers

These reports will probably raise (or bring back) the question that seems to have been lost in the hype; the question that a lot of people ask when first encountering Twitter: what's the point? Why bother? In an age when there are more demands on our time than ever before, it's a question worth asking.

That said, however, as it has settled into popular culture, Twitter has found a handful of surprisingly useful niches in business. Journalists have found it to be a powerful tool for digging up sources (CNN has been a particularly glaring advocate); it's come in handy for discount airlines such as JetBlue and Southwest who use Twitter to track customer comments and offer deals; similarly retailers have found success using the service to both monitor potential complaints about products and to hawk sales and discounts (Dell claims to have racked up $1 million in sales last year based on their Twitterstream); most recently and unexpectedly a new crop of mobile street food vendors have been using Twitter to keep hungry customers informed on their whereabouts. And there will surely be more of these pockets of usefulness as time goes on, but for now perhaps it's due time for cold, hard numbers to cut through some of the hype.