There’s always this saying about the 80-20 rule. For example, 80% of the world’s wealth is owned by 20% of the world’s population; 80% of the products and services sold in the world are consumed by 20% of buyers around the world; 80% of innovative ideas are produced by 20% of the people in the world; and so on and so forth. Mostly it refers to that 20% of people being innovators, rich people and/or great thinkers producing, thinking or consuming 80% of goods.
However, this little rule doesn’t seem to apply to Twitter. Let me make a pause right here. There are three kinds of people as far as Twitter is concerned: people who aren’t in on it, people who just have it because they’ve heard of it and visit the webpage once in a while, and the heavy users who download apps such as Tweet Deck to be glued to it 24/7. Guess which do I fit in?
Anyway, Yahoo! recently published a very interesting statistic: 50% of Tweets are generated by less than 0.05% of users. Which means that heavy users, really ARE heavy users. (Read full article http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20110328/tc_mashable/50_of_tweets_consumed_come_from_only_005_of_twitter_users_study )
But what kind of Tweets are being sent out to the world? Most of these tweets are from companies linking interesting articles to their page so that you can be well informed about their product and/or service. Millions of other tweets are in fact Re tweets: a tweet you found so interesting that you want to forward it to your followers. Others also include any given page, article or blog entry (cough, cough) that you may want to share to the world through the Tweet button at the bottom of it.
In reality, tweets are to share information. Some call it micro-blogging, but it’s also a way to express your interests, even if you are not the author of the item you are sharing. See how the Internet excels at changing general statistics? Success!