According to an AYTM Market Research Study, 42% of Twitter users rarely tweet from their own accounts. The study surveyed 200 Twitter users by asking, "how often do you tweet?" This seems surprising considering as of June 2011 there were 200 million tweets generated per day.
The study had a broad focus group of 200 individuals answering a few questions about their daily Twitter use. Of these users, 43% signed up for Twitter within the last 1-2 years. A staggering 31.5% of these users rarely log on to to read tweets from those they follow. While 75% of these users surveyed follow less than 100 accounts.
Are Twitter users apathetic? Can a comparison be drawn from how long a person's been using Twitter to how active they are on the network? Is a small portion of the Twitter audience creating the most amount of tweets? More studies analyzing these type of correlations will be extremely helpful in generating a better understanding of how users are really using Twitter.
Download the full study here for more insights about these users, as well as graphs highlighting the results of each question: AYTM Twitter Survey
How would you as a Twitter user answer these questions? Do you think people on Twitter prefer not to participate and just read what others have to tweet? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Brian Honigman is the Social Media Account Manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics certified partner that also specializes in social media, search engine optimization and PPC. You can follow him on Twitter @Brian_Honigman or @LunaMetrics.