Twitter breaks the 80/20 rule, and other fun stats

So, Harvard Business did some Twitter number crunching and managed to slice and dice our favorite supplier of “pointless little messages” into some interesting cross sections.

While anyone who dabbles in marketing, productivity, software or anything ending in 2.0 is likely familiar with the Pareto Principle/80-20 rule (80% of problems/revenue/herpes infections come from 20% of your customers, etc.), it differs slightly with Twitter. The top 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of all tweeting. While this may seem intuitive to anyone who uses Twitter, the study points out that this tidbit exposes power users as less interactive and less accessible than their Twitter-plebe peers. To these users, Twitter may not be so much a way to converse with others as a self-centered one-way conversation, promoting their opinions and ventures while giving little back to their less-clouty followers.

Another interesting Twitter stat exposes some surprising gender gaps. From the study:

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women…

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.

Given widespread awareness of Twitter’s low retention rate, perhaps less surprising is the data on the median number of Tweets per registered user- one. That is one tweet for the entire life of the Twitter account. Any data on how many first and only tweets were about Spymaster?