A new article on
Social Media Today reports that a new study by Pew Research has once again underlined the 'dominance of the few' rule on social media, with the numbers showing that around 25% of Twitter users in the US produce around 97% of all tweets
As the chart bluntly illustrates, a small, highly active group of Twitter users dominate the discussion on the platform - which would suggest that getting the right users to share your brand messaging can have a big impact, as only a fraction of Twitter users are actively engaging and posting updates regularly.
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"Although the top 25% of users produced the overwhelming majority of tweets within the study period, original tweets made up just 14% of their posts. By contrast, roughly 80% of tweets from this group are either direct retweets (49%) or replies to other tweets (33%). Replies and retweets similarly make up the majority of posts from less active tweeters as well."
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82% of tweets, from all users, are replies and retweets, not original posts, with retweets being the dominant element. That could suggest that there's not much original thought going around the Twitter-sphere, despite the amount of tweets being shared, while it also points to how the platform is being used to amplify certain elements through re-amplification.
50% of all tweets, based on these stats, are retweets - which makes sense, as that would also include people adding their own comments to those retweets as well (Pew doesn't specify the use of Quote Tweets here). But it may also indicate that Twitter is not the hive of ideas and discussion that it might seem, with few users sharing anything at all, and when they do, much of that is tied to previous tweets, not entirely original thought.
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"Among users who volunteered their profiles for research purposes, 65% said their account is public, 19% said their account is private and the remaining 17% said they're not sure. But in actuality, a direct examination of the privacy settings of these users' accounts revealed that the vast majority (89%) of U.S. adults on Twitter have public accounts that are visible to anyone visiting the site. Put differently, 83% of Twitter users who say their accounts are private or who are not sure of their privacy settings actually have public accounts."
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