Twitter came to life as a place where you could engage in live, real-time conversation with your friends and loved ones, but it seems as though the actual users of Twitter aren’t engaging in the world at large very much. If you hold any truth to a recent study of Twitter done by security firm Barracuda Networks, only 21% of Twitter users are active. In this case, an active user has posted 10 tweets, has 10 followers, and follows at least 10 people. Rather than using Twitter as a social tool, users are hopping onto it to follow their favorite celebrities or use Twitter as a de-facto news feed.
This takes the bloom off Twitter’s rose a bit, given they wanted to position themselves as a vibrant, living social media service and legitimate competition to the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world. If they’re not engaging with their social circle, then that’s bad news for Twitter. When you’re just using the service to pump out RSS feeds or spy on the famous, then that makes it a lot harder to turn your eyeballs into money.
Tags: Twitter, Twitter user statistics, 27% of Twitter users active, Barracuda Networks, Twitter becoming a news feed, Twitter news feed, Twitter uses, social media, social networking