Twitter Lurkers

Yeah, it's a thing.

No, They're not the Peeping Toms of the Twitterverse. They're not their to get noticed. They're not there to garner followers. They're...just curious.

Pew has posted some research on this. It should be no surprise that a small minority does a large majority of the posting on the platform. For example,  just 6% of all U.S. adults with public accounts on the site, but they account for 73% of tweets from American adults that mention national politics.

In Pew's analysis, the terms “lurkers” and “infrequent tweeters” are used interchangeably to refer to U.S. adults who have posted an average of fewer than five tweets per month since they first opened their account, whether those tweets were original messages, retweets, quote tweets or replies. To refer to U.S. adult Twitter users who are not “lurkers,” we use the terms “active tweeters” or “frequent tweeters” interchangeably.

Here are five facts about Lurkers according to Pew:

1. Half of US adults, who use Twitter, post about five times a month.
2. 41%  of the Lurkers say they visit only a few times a month or less often.
3. Twitter Lurkers are more likely than other users to get a variety of views.
4. Lurkers don't do a lot of following and they do not have many followers.
5. Replies to other users are the most common type of tweet by infrequent tweeters. They account for roughly half (51%) of lurkers’ tweets, compared with 30% of those from more frequent tweeters.

The challenge for Twitter will be converting Lurkers into more frequent users. The other challenge may be getting Lurkers to post. They're not going to drive eyeballs to the platform.