Twitter is unreliable for companies to get customers’ feedback, why?

According to the Harvard Business School study only a small part of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content. That is why companies cannot fully rely on the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of the public opinion.

As is known Twitter Inc is a social networking website in which users post messages of 140 characters or less -- known as "tweets" -- that can be viewed by other users who elect to follow them.

In May the Harvard researchers were studying the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts. They examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users.

Thus, they found that 10% of Twitter users generate over 90% of the content, says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. At that half of the users post their message on the social networking site only once every three days. According to the research the median number of lifetime "tweets" per user is just one.

Meantime, many companies are increasingly turning to Twitter to improve their understanding of how consumers view them. But as some users are far more active and vocal than others it limits information gleaned from messages on the site.

"If you're trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you're probably better off staying away from Twitter," he said in an interview.