Twitter Study

Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, a graduate student and an assistant professor, respectively, at the Harvard Business School, studied 300,000 plus Twitter users to see… well, to see what use it is. They presented their results last week in a catchily titled piece, “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” on one of the HBS blogs, which has subsequently been picked up by various news media. (See today’s BBC story, for example.)

Here are some of their findings, presented in point form:

• People understand how Twitter works: 80% of users had at least one follower and followed at least one person.
• There are more women (55%) than men (45%) on Twitter.
• Men have more reciprocal relationships than women on Twitter.
• Both men and women were more likely to follow a man.
• The median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.
• The top 10% of Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.

The implication of the last point, together with the relative paucity of lifetime tweets, is that Twitter is a broadcast mechanism, rather than a social network, a one-to-many flow of data rather than a chit-chat channel.

Twitter’s old enough now to do a similar study of its use by lawyers. It might be difficult (but not impossible?) to unearth all legal Twitter users, or a fair sample, so that you could include not simply those who are evidently vociferous but also who’ve tried it once or twice and then have fallen by the wayside. These latter are unlikely to be lawyers who declare themselves as Twitter users in the various lists that have sprung up on the web. But it may be that they identify themselves as lawyers in the brief tagline that Twitter lets you use to describe yourself. At any rate, a properly done study of legal tweeting would be interesting.