Skip to content

Meformers?

STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me
“Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.
After dissecting over 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter() users’ status updates the professors concluded that 80% of users are “meformers,” or “Me Now” status updaters.”
I don’t know about the segmentation this study uses – meformers vs informers. It sounds a tad judgemental.
It is interesting that Informers have a higher proportion of mentions of other users in their messages and that 25% of the studied messages come from mobile phones.
Anyway, it’s more grist for the mill.
They only looked at 3,000 tweets which less than a second of Twitter streams.
Stephen

  • Pro plugin deactivated or invalid

Posted on: October 1, 2009, 9:52 am Category: Uncategorized

By: stephen

rev="post-2687" 2 comments

2 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Kevin Kim said
    on October 1, 2009 4:13 pm

    It’s my view that, before saying Twitter is all for Narcissists, or “all about me”, you should first be mindful of the “nature” and intention of Twitter. What does Twitter ask in the first place? What are you doing? So naturally, particularly for starters, answering to the question would be what Twitterers are supposed to do. Also as you know, many Twitterers don’t really get response or other dialogue-triggering comments back. So chances are that those 350 users would shoot monologues into the dark.
    Furthermore, people are inherently selfish and all about themselves. Are those researchers not?

  2. wnylibrarian said
    on October 2, 2009 11:46 am

    Perhaps I’m missing something here, but isn’t that the point of Twitter? The purpose of following someone? Okay, so I admit that some of the stuff can get to be a bit much, “I’m cooking breakfast,” but when a colleague posts, “I’m preparing for a presentation next month in San Diego” I’m interested. I like to know what my friends and colleagues are working on in addition to those I haven’t personally met in similar fields. I’m sure another study could find most people who golf also watch golf on television. Well, yeah. I take this study with a grain of salt.