Twitter one of the leading website in this world which
was created by the (Read the
Inspiring story of founder of twitter). There are now 190 million Twitter users
around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users
now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about
themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).
So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what
is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?
Since Twitter didn't exist until 2006, psychologists have
had little chance to explore it, but some of the early research suggests a social
network unlike those that came before. Here are 10 of my favourite insights
from this research, some less obvious than others.
Before we get onto the research, though, here's a quick
intro for Twitter newbies:
What
is Twitter?
Twitter is a cross between a social network and a blog.
The blog part is that users read and write 140 character 'tweets' which are
largely public. The social network part is that people 'follow' each other then
become part of each other's Twitter conversations, they can also 'retweet' or
retransmit other people's messages to their own followers.
A1.
Twitter is like a game of broken telephone
Because messages are short and can be broadcast quickly
and easily, Twitter can feel to its users like a fast-paced conversation (Boyd
et al., 2010). The difference from a normal conversation is that people are
taking part in a whole range of different interactions. It's like being at a
party and talking to 10 different groups at the same time.
All sorts of processes that you would recognise from
conversations are also going on in Twitter: much information is simply repeated
(retweeted) but messages are corrupted over time, like a game of broken
telephone (UK: Chinese whispers), as people re-evaluate, re-interpret or
misinterpret the meaning of the original tweet.
But Twitter doesn't always feel like a conversation as
people use it in different ways. In the same way that talking isn't always
conversation, sometimes it's a command, an expression of surprise or an aid to
thought. In other words, Twitter isn't just social, it has a big informational
component, which we'll come on to.
A2.
People join Twitter to follow their friends
Network analysis of Twitter users in the early days by
Java et al. (2007) suggested that people join because their friends are already
using it. The networks resembled those seen in the analysis of cell phone
networks.
The huge number of users is just what we've come to
expect from the internet: people can easily conform to the technological norm
because services are often free, and it's well-known that free is a special
price we can't resist. The number of users is less interesting than what people
are using it for and why.
A3.
Most tweets are babble
While not academic research, some insight into what
people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who
categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories
(similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):
Pointless babble: 41%
Conversational: 38%
Pass-along value: 9%
Self-promotion: 6%
Spam: 4%
News: 4%
What they call 'pointless babble' might better be called
social pleasantries, social grooming or at least just babble. Like when someone
says "How are you?" and you say "Fine." It may be
low-level, but it's not pointless.
A4.
The average age is 31
The average (median) age for a Twitter user is 31, older
than the median MySpace user who is 26, but younger than Facebook which is now
33. LinkedIn has the oldest users with the median being 39. Predictably the
strongest growth in Twitter use is amongst those aged 18-24 (Pew, 2009).
A5.
Men are Twitter leaders
Some suggestions of sex differences come from Heil &
Piskorski (2009). They found that there were slightly more women than men on
Twitter (55% women), but that, on average, men had 15% more followers than
women, with men twice as likely to follow another man as they were a woman, and
women 25% more likely to follow men. Both men and women, however, were found to
tweet at the same rate.
This finding is unusual given that it's normally women
who are the focus of attention on social networks, from both other men and
other women.
I'm always cautious about reporting sex differences and
keen to point out that psychologically men and women are very similar. But
perhaps there's something about Twitter that, on average, fits slightly more
with men.
A6.
20 per cent are 'informers', 80 per cent are 'meformers'
After examining 350 messages collected from Twitter,
Naaman (2010) found two different types of user:
Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other
users
Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about
themselves.
Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps
because they passed on more interesting things and weren't talking about themselves
all the time.
This split hints at the different ways that people use
Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have
been overstated. If 80% of users don't reply to others then it's not that
social.
A7.
Trends are one-time and short-lived
Tweets on a particular topic (Twitter trends) rarely last
longer than a week and usually no more than a few days (Kwak et al., 2010).
Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these
trends are news-related.
Perhaps the reason for this is that trends, which are
attached to the use of particular words or phrases, are often very specific.
A8.
Average tweet frequency is 1
The average (median) lifetime number of tweets for a
Twitter user is 1 (Heil & Piskorski, 2009). This means most people who sign
up are just following others or don't use it at all. Once again, the power of
'free' and very low barriers to entry.
At the other end of the scale 10% of Twitter users
contribute 90% of the tweets. This finding is unusual compared to other social
networks where the use isn't nearly so top-heavy. Heil & Piskorski note
that in this respect Twitter is more like Wikipedia, which has a similar rate
of top-heavy usage. Many but not all of the most-followed Twitter users are,
unsurprisingly, celebrities.
This top-heavy usage reflects the fact that being
interesting is a talent that not everyone can acquire (without relying on the
halo effect of being famous that is). Occasionally, though, some manage the
trick of being famous and quite interesting, e.g. Stephen Fry.
A9.
Existential angst can motivate users
Twitter is often uncharitably said to be perfect for our
narcissistic age. It enables people to gather followers, talk about themselves,
all without having to listen to anyone else.
A small study conducted by Qiu et al. (2010) has
suggested that amongst the extroverted it really is existential angst that
motivates tweeting. The same wasn't found, though, for those who weren't so
extroverted.
I'd put forward a more positive argument: Twitter is
simply a fun toy that's easy to use. It's much easier than blogging, you can
mess around, you don't have to say much and it makes the web a little more
homely. At the same time it's not as obsessed as Facebook and other social networks
with gathering and displaying huge amounts of information about you. It's less
social than Facebook, which people seem to like.
A10.
Twitter is less social and more informational
Support for the idea that Twitter is more informational
and less social than other social networks comes from Johnson and Yang (2009;
PDF) who found that people treat other Twitter users primarily as interesting
information sources.
In this study people also gained the most gratification
from information they had found through Twitter. The social aspect of it,
however, participants didn't find particularly gratifying, despite a positive
expectation.
Network analysis also tends to play down the social
aspects of the site. Twitter shows relatively low levels of reciprocity
compared with other social networking sites. Only 22% of Twitter users have
reciprocal links between them, compared with 68% on Flickr and 84% on Yahoo!
360.
Kwak et al. (2010) found that the average path length is
4.12 with 93.5% of people within 5 or fewer hops of everyone else. This is
mostly because Twitter is dominated by a small number of celebrities, making
many more big nodes than would be expected in a social network.
Future
Twitter
Of course these are only the first insights emerging from
the research and people are evolving new and interesting ways of using and
analysing Twitter all the time. Here are a few that I came across on my virtual
travels.
Hughes and Palen (2009) looked at the use of Twitter in
mass and emergency events. Tweets during two hurricanes and two political
conventions suggested that people are increasingly using Twitter to share
information with each other.
Here's another way in which the informational nature of
Twitter has come to the fore. Twitter is perfect for a crisis when information
needs to be moved quickly and efficiently around social networks. Indeed
researchers can detect emergency events like earthquakes by monitoring Twitter
(Sakaki et al., 2010).
Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the
nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US,
analysed their emotional content, and produced a 'mood of the nation' video. It
shows how the emotional content of people's tweets changes over the day (red is
negative and green positive):
Interestingly their Twitter analysis backs up a finding I
covered previously that Monday is not the most depressing day of the week using
a radically different method.
Twitter is even starting to be used by researchers as a
health intervention (e.g. Young, 2009).
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