Twitter elite tweet the most

Just 20,000 'elite users' put out most tweets though there are over 200 million registered accounts, a study has found.


The Telegraph reported Tuesday that 50 percent of all tweets are by 20,000 elite users.

Yahoo! researchers scrutinised 260 million tweets between July 28, 2009, and March 8, 2010. They used Twitter 'lists' to distinguish between elite users - celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organisations, and ordinary users.


'Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter - roughly 50 percent of tweets consumed are generated by just 20,000 elite users - where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed,' a Yahoo! researcher was quoted as saying.


The researchers found that those on Twitter follow back far less than they're followed.

'The Twitter follower graph, in other words, does not conform to the usual characteristics of social networks, which exhibit much higher reciprocity and far less skewed degree distributions, but instead resembles more the mixture of one-way mass communications and reciprocated interpersonal communications,' they explained.


Twitter turned five earlier this month. It has said that a billion tweets are sent a week.


Source: bignewsnetwork.com