LIKE SEVERAL PEOPLE in my work cluster (many shown at left), my use of Twitter started to wane after 10,000 tweets. I figured out I could get more from lurking instead of tweeting. I'm part of a small slice of Twitter--less than 0.02% of Twitter users have sent more than 3,200 tweets. According to some interesting research from RJ Metrics, I'm not alone. RJ Metrics analysed a statistically valid sample of about 85,000 users and just over 3 Million tweets. Among other things, the research showed Twitter's user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month. A steady amount of new Twitter accounts is bots, brands, and bozos. Some of my most interesting twitter friends follow the fewest people--they're twitter bots. It surprised me to discover a global conclusion that I've seen close at hand: over 75% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times. Only about one in four registered users is actually tweeting in any given month. Like me, they might be seeing Twitter through search terms, not reading streams of tweets from people they follow. Several other interesting conclusions have emerged from a careful combing of Twitter data.
Remarkably, the average time between any two tweets from the same user is exactly 24 hours. Twitter usage also has lessons for online commitments relating to virtual education. Just as we know from study of Moodle, our virtual learning environment, we know that we can predict the level of engagement within two weeks of introducing the Moodle social learning network to students. In Twitter, researchers can look at the second week of someone's activities and reliably predict users' future behavior as a group. This cohort analysis unveils some other interesting data.
Even though there's a massive dropoff in Twitter users after the first month, the research shows "tweeting activity from the users who are left is so voluminous that it makes the "tweets per month" of each cohort average over 100%."
"In other words, the users who stick around actually tweet so frequently (and at such a rapid pace compared to their first month) that they more than make up for the lost activity of those who churned after the first month. This is a very powerful and unexpected statistic."
You can learn more by following @topgold on Twitter, win valuable prizes, and get first-hand information about where all the shiny, happy people congregate in Ireland.
Robert J. Moore -- "Twitter Data Analysis: an investor's perspective" on TechCrunch, 5 Oct 09. Moore runs RJ Metrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better.
Screenshot from http://twitter.mailana.com/profile.php?person=topgold&
