Most Twitter posts are made by just ten per cent of the social media site's total user base, according to a new study.

Carried out by graduating MBA student Bill Heil and assistant HBS professor of strategy Mikolaj Jan Piskorski - both of Harvard Business School - the research looked at how more than 300,000 Twitter users behaved on the site during May.

It found that 90 per cent of tweets were written by one-tenth of the user base - contrasting with the fact that 30 per cent of posts on a typical social network are made by the top ten per cent of prolific users.

Overall usage of Twitter was discovered to be surprisingly low, with Mr Heil and Mr Piskorski commenting: "Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.

"This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days."

The research also found that male Twitter users are most likely to follow other men and that they tend to follow their own followers.

About 99 per cent of web users aged between 18 and 24 use social networking sites, but just 22 per cent have an account on Twitter, according to a recent report from the Participatory Marketing Network.