MUMBAI: Twitter will become more like TV as the rate of typical users posting activities levels off. Research from two professors - Columbia Business School and University of Pittsburgh - believe the rate of social media user posts on Twitter will take a backseat to more TV content-based efforts from corporations and celebrities.

"Twitter will become less of a communications vehicle and more of a content-delivery vehicle, much like TV," said Olivier Toubia, the Glaubinger professor of business at Columbia Business School. The study was co-authored with Andrew T. Stephen, assistant professor of business administration and Katz Fellow in marketing at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration.

"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."

The study examined some 2,500 noncommercial Twitter users where "synthetic" accounts increased the selected group's followers. Initially, the selected group's followers increased and their posting rates. However, when that group reached a moderately large amount of followers the posting rate declined significantly.

Toubia said: "When posting activity no longer leads to additional followers, people will view Twitter as a non-evolving, static structure, like TV."

One of the study's conclusions: noncommercial users will consume content by commercial users: "Twitter is likely to become more of a platform where noncommercial users consume content posted by commercial users, rather than a platform where non-commercial users share content with each other."