Researchers from Columbia Business School and University of Pittsburgh predict that the "Twitter" medium will soon be used at a scale as large as the television.
The growing Twitter fan base is a sign of people's addiction and attraction towards the social network. But researchers have now found that Twitter will gradually grow into a "non-evolving, static structure, like TV."
Scientists from Columbia Business School and the University of Pittsburgh inspected the reason behind people's motivation towards contributing to Twitter, with no financial profits attached.
For the study, researchers selected 2,500 non-commercial Twitter users in a random fashion. They used some of those users and through fake accounts increased the number of selected group's followers. Study researchers, Professor Olivier Toubia and Professor Andrew T. Stephen, found that when the number of group followers was increased, the posting from the group members' also increased.
But when the group reached optimum level, with a large amount of followers, the posting rate from the group members declined significantly.
"Users began to realize it was harder to continue to attract more followers with their current strategy, so they slowed down," Toubia explained in a press release. "When posting activity no longer leads to additional followers, people will view Twitter as a non-evolving, static structure, like TV."
Researchers concluded that gradually Twitter will see a drop in the rate of 140-character-limit "tweets" from normal people, but celebrities will continue the trend for a financial gain.
Comparing it to the likes of television, Toubia said that "Twitter will become less of a communications vehicle and more of a content-delivery vehicle."
"Peer-to-peer contact is likely to evolve to the next great thing, but with 500 million followers, Twitter isn't just going to disappear. It's just going to become a new way to follow celebrities, corporations, and the like," Toubia concluded.
The findings are published in the journal Marketing Science.
