One Third of All Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted in Their Lives

I will not ask if you have Twitter account because my experience shows that there is hardly any person in the Profy audience who still manages to avoid the growing popularity of the microblogging tool. Also I will not ask how frequently you tweet because this question seems to be too personal to me. In fact, whenever I read anything about how frequently people tweet (or not), I invariably feel ashamed because I am a very lazy Twitter user and it is not unusual for me to get an occasional message from a follower asking me whether I am on vacation or something when I disappear from Twitter with my updates.

I have to admit it, I am not really addicted to Twitter and I don’t spend my time thinking what to update my Twitter stream with (you can find it here in case you want to follow my rare updates). In fact, I send new updates with the titles of my new posts on Profy automatically and also add some casual thoughts that I get when reading something or maybe with a link to an interesting or humorous page that I think my followers will enjoy. I become increasingly active on Twitter (rarely) when some of my questions or blog posts get a lot of replies and I reply to them myself. But again, I am probably one of the laziest tech bloggers when it comes to Twitter as I only update it when I think that I have something worthwhile to share instead of having some policy of when and how to update my Twitter stream.

But now imagine my surprise when I’ve found out that even with these lazy Twitter habits (that only accumulated me a little more than 5 and a half thousand updates) I somehow managed to get to the top 1% of Twitter users that have more than one thousand tweets. And it looks like the vast majority of Twitter population is not even lazy as an average Twitter user actually prefers to keep silent to communicating actively – thus never providing Twitter with information for their real-time search ambitions.

We have probably all heard already that on Twitter only a small group of people actually participates actively while the vast majority never or rarely updates their streams and probably never visit as well. This has been confirmed by a recent study by HubSpot: the study claimed that as many as 54.9% of all Twitter users never tweet at all.

Today I’ve seen the results of yet another study, this time carried out by RapLeaf, an online reputation management company, which has different results but is still worth taking a look at, I think. The study covered a sample of 4 million Twitter users (very similar to 4.5 million people studied by HubSpot) and demonstrated once again that people don’t necessarily join Twitter to do anything and a good number of them will always keep silent there.

It is impressive that as many as 76% of all Twitter users have less than 5 tweets with a half of those users having exactly zero tweets at all. By contrast, the top 10% of Twitter users sent more than 50 tweets with only 1% responsible for generating more than one thousand tweets.

It is a well-known fact that when it comes to virtually all the web services, people prefer to watch instead of actually participating. This is particularly true for user-generated content because people are normally unwilling to share their own information but are always curious enough to take a look at what others have to say.

On Twitter this is particularly visible so the entire hype about how rapidly Twitter is growing is not really that feasible because the value is not in the mere number of people who register but in the content these people create – and this is not the strong side of Twitter.

My guess here is that people only register on Twitter after they hear something about the cool tool on TV or maybe even from friends but even despite of all Twitter efforts they don’t really get the service and stay silent without ever updating their microblogs with a single “hello world” post. So Twitter may be growing rapidly but in some sense it still remains the same as the same group of people still generates the same volume of content while the new users (my guess here only) hardly add anything to the noise at all.