New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets
Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's reported audience expansion—from 1.6 million unique visitors in April 2008 to 32.1 million in April 2009—had made the service a prominent media and celebrity subject. January coverage had already cast its commercial prospects as a question of whether Twitter had found a business model.
The new research complicates the meaning of that growth: a large audience does not necessarily mean a large population of active publishers, and following patterns may limit how broadly messages travel across the service.
First-order effects
- Twitter's audience and traffic figures become a weaker proxy for conversational activity when most users rarely post, forcing its product and commercial positioning to distinguish readers from contributors.
- Advertisers and media users seeking broad social distribution face a network in which male users predominantly follow other men, making follower totals an incomplete measure of reach.
Second-order effects
- Marketing buyers gain an incentive to evaluate active participation and follower-network composition alongside Twitter's headline audience metrics, increasing the importance of audience measurement around the service.
- Twitter's prospective business model is more dependent on turning passive readers into a valuable audience than on treating account or visitor growth alone as evidence of engagement.
Third-order effects
- If participation remains concentrated among a minority of users, social-media economics will increasingly separate the value of content creators and distribution networks from the size of the registered or visiting audience.
- The study points toward a platform market where demographic clustering and engagement quality—not raw growth—shape the usefulness of social channels for media and marketing.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from a growth narrative based on audience size toward one based on who produces content, who follows whom, and how messages actually circulate.