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Study: Twitter's 'Elite' Minority Still Producing Half of All Tweets

by Amar Toor on March 29, 2011 at 10:00 AM

Twitter may be growing in population and volume, but, according to a new study from Cornell University and Yahoo Research, the site still relies upon a small fraction of its users to churn out the majority of its tweets.

The site currently boasts around 200 million users and sees about 140 million tweets per day. Half of those, however, are generated by less than 0.05-percent of all Twitter users -- a group of 20,000 that constitutes what researchers have called an "elite" class. A 2009 study from Harvard found similar results, concluding that 10-percent of users were responsible for 90-percent of the network's tweets.

Researchers at Cornell and Yahoo further divided this slice of elite users into four categories: celebrities, media outlets, organizations, and blogs. And, as it turns out, there isn't a lot of cross-category exchange. "Within the population of elite users, moreover, attention is highly homophilous, with celebrities following celebrities, media following media, and bloggers following bloggers," the report reads. Shocking.

Tags: Blog, celebrities, media, population, report, SocialNetworking, study, top, tweet, twitter, users, Web

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