Sunday, June 14, 2009

Twitter is being co-opted by marketers and mainstream media


A new study on Twitter has determined that 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity on the microblogging service.
What’s more, 15% of Twitter users account for 91% of activity on the site, according to Sysomos, a social media analytics firm. Sysomos analyzed data on 11.5 million Twitter accounts for its study posted June 11.
Sysomos said 21% of Twitter users have never posted a Tweet and 85% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day.
Twitter might not be about “two-way micro-conversations as it is about one-way micro-broadcasting,” as TechCrunch noted recently. Most people on Twitter are sheep who don’t tweet much, TechCrunch said.
Just as Web logs, or blogs, were co-opted by mainstream media outlets and commercial enterprises, so too is Twitter. As Twitter has grown, it’s become an audience that companies like Dell can market to and news organizations like CNN and Fox can exploit.
Those organizations are now started to dominate the conversation because they can blast out so many news stories and updates or marketing pitches.

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