Just 7% of Twitterers make up 80% of its content!

Alex Burmaster, Communications Director, UK & EMEA, Nielsen’s online division, has recently been investigating into how much time users spend on social networking sites and the results are really interesting. (Nielsen Wire)

The study split Twitter’s contributors and consumers into three groups: light, medium and heavy visitors. Results were that ‘light’ users accounted for 67% of the overall audience but averaged less than 2 minutes on the site per month. The ‘Medium’ users made up 26 percent of the audience, averaging over 22 minutes per month, but the ‘heavy’ users’ account for only 7 percent of the audience yet averaged almost 6 hours and 17 minutes!

-This means that 93 percent of the people who visit Twitter account for just 20 percent of the content posted and consumed and the remaining 7% create or consume 80% of the content.

These results aren’t unusual for social networking sites:

MySpace – 3% of visitors account for 63% of total time spent on the site
Bebo – 14% of visitors account for 87 percent of total time.
LinkedIn – 5% of visitors account for half the total time.
Facebook – 52% of users account for 98% o time spent on the site.

Here at Ranieri wer’e constantly on Twitter re-tweeting blogs such as this one, keeping up to date with industry news and chatting with our journalist buddies, so we wouldn’t be surprised if a large chunk of that 7% came from Ranieri HQ!

Pietro Ranieri comments on the findings… “The research is very interesting and quite believable, but does it take into account users who rarely visit the twitter and facebook sites themselves, but do all their tweeting and facebooking from third party applications like tweetdeck, echofon, facebook for iphone etc, where they spend a massive amount of time?”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 4:05 pm and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.