80% of Social Media is About ME

Yes!! Just last week I was lamenting that everything is all about you—but it turns out that now it’s all about me! Or at least when it comes to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, according to Rutgers University researchers Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase (and Mashable).

After analyzing 3000 tweets from >350 tweeple, the study found that there were two basic types of Twitter users: informers and “meformers”—people who broadcast information centered around themselves, and their thoughts, activities and location. Only 20% of users turned out to be informers—leaving 80% as “meformers.”

Okay, so maybe this really isn’t surprising—40% of Twitter messages answer the microblogging service’s question in the box at the top of the page: what are you doing? Perhaps most interesting is their comparison of the two categories’ profiles on Twitter:

Interesting enough, though, the study also showed that the informers have significantly more friends and followers than their meformer counterparts. The median informer has 131 friends and 112 followers, while the median meformer has just 61 friends and 43 followers.

Again, though, it’s small wonder that people who post links helpful to others have twice as many friends and three times as many followers as people who tend to use the service for navel gazing.

What do you think? Who would you rather follow—a meformer or an informer? Which are you?