Who Tweets?

After a nice long time away from home on a re-invigorating but not necessarily relaxing time in Europe - I have been catching up on some oldies and goodies stuffed in my inbox.

One question that keeps bugging me is who are the Twits (aka those who Tweet a lot)? And with apologies to Roald Dahl, there are some interesting stats to determine this. I am going to bias you a little by telling you who I think are the Twits.

In my view Tweeting is not a completely bad thing - but it definitely is not a great thing.

What bugs me is that there is no ability to determine on my part what I get. Actually that is not completely true - I can use Tweetdeck or something else as that tool. But my gripe is that I cannot filter the stream of trash that people Tweet on. And that may be both its beauty as well as its Achilles Heel.

HBR published some research by one of Havard's students last year on the topic. While the study was looking at the trend of who follows - the final statement was interesting from my perspective.

" In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users .... This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."

In my view the value is that you can reach a lot of people with the tool. However what goes into the message and who reads it becomes almost impossible to filter. Indeed in that case it is more like a conventional media outlet than a 2 way communication. Little wonder then that it has endeared itself to either sycophants and their followers or commercial entities.

For a more indepth view of Who Tweets Arbitron and Edison Research click on this link.

You have to register but the report is free.

There are some great fun facts. 40% of Twits are seriously sad people with at least 3 working PCs in their home. And their top 3 TV programs are"

American Idol
Glee
Teen Choice Awards

Therefore I can conclude that most Tweets come from zit emboldened male teens who spend way too much time on their computers.

But you be the judge... its all a bit too weird for me.

Cheers