I came across an article the other day on Harvard Business in which they discussed the results of their recent Twitter research.

For the project they took a samle of over 300,000 accounts. They found a lot of interesting stats about including :

• Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women
• We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman
• The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets
• Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one (Apparently yhis translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days)

I recommend reading the article in full from the link below

Link : New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

After being the first person to reach 1 million Twitter followers 6 weeks ago, Ashton Kutcher seems to have reached another milestone by being the first person to reach 2 million Twitter followers.

It’s crazy to think that in just 6 weeks he managed to add one million followers. It wouldn’t be surprised if he had 5 million by the end of the year. The CNN breaking news Twitter account @cnnbrk has dropped down to 3rd place with 1.6 million followers, being overtaken by Ellen DeGeneres, which kind of surprised me.

Ashton Kutcher is very active on Twitter and interacts with his followers, the CNN account is popular because…well because CNN is popular but I the rise of the @TheEllenShow puzzles me a little. I know Ellen is very popular on the US but she doesn’t appear to reply to any followers so I can’t understand her meteroic rise.

Though by comparing their follower count over the last 3 months, it’s not out of the blue. It appears that she has wasn’t mentioned much in the news rush in April about breaking 1 million followers.

Do you think Ashton will be the first person to reach the 3 million mark?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone spoke to Reuters yesterday via a videolink about how Twitter could make money in the future. In it he points out that many large companies are benefitting from using Twitter so one thin they are considernig is paid services for businesses.

It’s good to know that they are looking at ways to make money without annoying the user. Here’s an excerpt from the Reuters article.

“There are a few reasons why we’re not pursuing advertising — one is it’s just not quite as interesting to us,” Stone told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York via videolink from San Francisco.

Stone said serving up ads alongside Twitter messages could also annoy users. And he said Twitter doesn’t have, and isn’t seeking to hire, the staff to create an advertising-based business.

“There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don’t have anyone there to make or take those calls,” said the executive, whose real name is Christopher Isaac Stone. He acquired the Biz title based on a childhood mispronunciation of his name.

I’m curious as to what services they will offer businesses. More statistics, improved interface, consultation?

Click on the link below to read the full article

Link : Twitter sees tools, not ads, for revenue

I was reading TechCrunch today and read that hip hop star Dolla (real name Roderick Anthony Burton II) has been shot and killed in Los Angeles. It’s very sad news indeed.

It’s just a coincedence that he had only joined Twitter hours earlier under the username dollagang. Thousands of fans are now tagging his account and sending on their regards (You can see this by searching for @dollagang)

Twitter started out as a cat-blogging tool. Well, that’s not exactly what it was designed for, but the microblogging platform quickly gained the reputation of being for cat-bloggers because so many of the early users were tweeting about their cats.

Now, I’ve had a cat. They don’t do much. My dog has much more personality. So are there more than 500,000 people following a Twitter account created on behalf of Jason Scott’s pet cat Sockington, as noted by TechCrunch?

Take a stroll through Sockington’s Twitter stream–it’s all about what he does, day in and day out. And having gained such popularity, Scott has landed speaking gigs, and is even co-authoring a book with his pet cat Sockington, of course.

It looks like the fascination with cats hasn’t disappeared from Twitter. What’s interesting, however, is the return of cat-blogging to the forefront of current Twitter news and activity. I think we’re all left scratching our heads. And that includes Scott.

In three months, Sockington went from a few hundred followers to nearly 509k. Why no one really knows the answer to that, we can glean a lesson or two from Scott’s experience.
As Sockington isn’t the only cat in the house, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Scott also has a Twitter account for his other cat Penny. Her followers rest right around 2,000, which is respectable. But it’s nowhere near half a million followers.

If you look at a few things you’ll notice a useful tip or two, based on Scott’s multiple Twitter account management. He doesn’t follow many users back, and he doesn’t really engage them in conversation. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that cats don’t talk to humans in real life, so why break character just for Twitter?

What’s notable here is the leveraging of one of Scott’s cats’ Twitter accounts for the other. Penny often uses an @reply in orer to drive traffic back to the Sockington account. This is a tactic i highly recommend if you’re managing two related Twitter accounts.

When it’s all said and done, however, I think the exploding growth of Sockington’s followers is indicative of what the mainstream really thinks about Twitter–it’s a funny site that’s full of entertainment. With celebrities taking over Twitter and the public eating it up, it’s no surprise to me that someone like Sockington can build an audience too. He faked it till he made it in a way that only a cat could do.