If you’re used to tailoring your marketing campaigns to reach that category of people dubbed the opinion leader, you might have a new buzzword (buzzphrase?) to learn: Twitter Elite.

Elites: survey names top five in each category

Why? Because a new academic survey claims that a tiny proportion of Twitter’s users — roughly 20,000 individuals — take up about 50% of Twitter’s attention.

The research has been carried out by people at Cornell University and Yahoo! Research to establish an answer to the question “Who says what to whom on Twitter?”

It has broken Twitter down into an elite 20,000 of people, based on tweeters who appear in the most lists. These are then categorised as either media, celebrity, organisation or blogs and bloggers (the rest of us are categorised as ordinary users). The research found that celebrities are tweeted at the most by the other members of the elite, followed by the media.

By contrast, bloggers are the heaviest retweeters of content generated by the elite 20,000; celebrities retweet the least. No surprise there perhaps as Twitter is a perfect way for bloggers to connect and share their work.

Another interesting finding is that, in a world where you are able to follow absolutely anyone from many different walks of life, people tend to follow and listen to people the same as them — something important to remember if you’re attempting to use Twitter for awareness raising.