Twitter Enhances Realtime Learning at Conferences

A European study on "How People are using Twitter during Conferences" has demonstrated that participants use Twitter to enhance realtime learning. Although the sample size was small, and covered only 5 conferences, the researchers found that the majority of conference attendees already had a Twitter account (95.1%) and many of those who did actively used it to tweet during the conference (67.5%).

The most interesting insight was that nearly half the tweets were simple plain text messages while tweets with links to web sites only accounted for 10% of the messages. In other words, the Twitterers were using the medium to share the information they were learning at the present moment as opposed to posting links to information already available on the web.

The study report has been published in draft form. Thanks to Shel Israel for making me aware of this study.