A few users post most Twitter content, study says

A tiny fraction of those who use Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows.

That makes it hard for companies to use the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion, the Harvard Business School study said.

Twitter is a social networking website in which users post messages of 140 characters or less — known as ‘‘tweets’’ — that can be viewed by other users who elect to follow them.

The study examined entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users’ Twitter accounts.

Ten percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all users post messages less than once every 74 days.

The median number of lifetime ‘‘tweets’’ per user is just one, according the research.

Companies are increasingly turning to Twitter to improve their understanding of how consumers view them, he said. But some users are far more active and vocal than others, limiting information gleaned from messages on the site, said Piskorski, an assistant professor.

‘‘If you’re trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you’re probably better off staying away from Twitter,’’ he said.
(Reuters)