Comments on: Typical Twitter user is a young woman with an iPhone & 208 followers

By: harry_wood

harry_wood — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:21:32 +0000

This has been observed in many online community platforms of varying types. Most people lurk and view the content without participating. Often they’ll register an account, but then chicken out when it comes to adding anything.

In the OpenStreetMap community we’ve been puzzling over this for years. Why do so many people register on OpenStreetMap (the way to get access in order to edit the map), but then never edit the map? http://neis-one.org/2010/08/„nominal-members“-of-osm/

As people involved in designing the system and trying to improve usability etc in order to grow the user base, this is frustrating, but it’s a well known phenomenon. Academics call it “participation inequality” http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

By: jay keppers

jay keppers — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:49:31 +0000

This is absolutely rubbish. these monitoring solutions are good enough for making a qualified guess and should not be making such misleading statements. How did they manage an article on gigaom?

By: jamie rishaw

jamie rishaw — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:27:36 +0000

This “study” also (and more importantly imho) does not address the better stat of “Who is the typical twitter poster”.

Analytics can get quite complex on this; Typical user with /n/ influence|retweets|views, longevity, acceleration of followers versus longevity – it’s rather hard to compartmentalize these data.

(because I’d LOVE to publish a report, app, js, h5 or other tool) I’ve worked with statisticians around Chicago that are nothing but confused when trying to nail down who/what an average (or) typical (or) median (or) normative user would represent, statistically, and this is with collected data of over a billion ‘tweets’. (..not to mention metadata that users never see that developers would).

I came here in “hopes” that someone could simplify/visualize some of these data in terms of interpreting data, but as with all studies so far on this topic, I’m left with dicke Eier haben, as it were.

-j

By: Raymond Manders

Raymond Manders — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 11:00:52 +0000

This is a good reminder that researches such as these are a complete waste of time and recourses.

By: dalekcat

dalekcat — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:43:51 +0000

I tweet, I have an iPhone, but that’s as far as the headline is accurate for me. Isn’t this just a load of rubbish like most statistics?

By: Bethan Jenkins

Bethan Jenkins — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:41:23 +0000

Has any such study been conducted about how those who use other languages use and access twitter? Its been suggested to me that those who use twitter via the medium of Welsh would not fit neatly in to these categories.

By: jfranzlien

jfranzlien — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:04:10 +0000

The distinction between the media-politics-tech-celebrity-sports bubble and the rest of us is interesting. I must admit that of the various social media, I’ve found Twitter the hardest to warm up to. Though last year I was a conference organizer and we invited a local newspaper columnist to join a panel on social networking. His key point was Facebook is dead and Twitter rules. As if to prove his point, he was tweeting non-stop the whole time he was on the panel. Then half way through he apologized and said “s*** happens, literally and you’ll read about it in tomorrow’s newspaper”. Then he jumped up and ran out the door. Turns out he was covering a story about a disaster at a sewage pumping station. Rather than being upset, the audience was absolutely fascinated.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 19:27:37 +0000

Tweeting is not a prerequisite to using Twitter. Some of us are simply followers.

By: Dani

Dani — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:01:40 +0000

does this mean I’m a stereotype? :(

By: Ramki

Ramki — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:31:13 +0000

25% if the tweeter users never twetted because, they don’t know how to use, how to network with people