A new study from aytm.com reveals that many new Twitter account holders aren’t taking advantage of the social media platform as much as they could. Their survey took into account 200 Twitter users and found that over one third of them just got started with the service within the last year. 43% got started with Twitter within the last two years.

42% of all those who responded claim that they “rarely” tweet anything. Only about 20% say they tweet at least daily. Take a look at the chart:

What else is interesting about the responses are the number of times users are checking material being tweeted by those they follow. The numbers are quite a bit lower than I would have guessed. Less than 12% read posts from those they follow multiple times per day and only about 15% read tweets on a daily basis. Many people (31%) report that they “rarely” read tweets from those who they follow. I thought reading other’s posts was the whole reason for having Twitter.

Most users (75%) followed less than 100 accounts and very few (2.5%) followed more than 1000. A majority (over 60%) of Twitter folks used the service to follow friends and family, many followed celebrities (almost 54%), but much smaller numbers (under 43%) followed brands or specific companies. I wonder what this means fro Twitter Brand Pages?

So those are the facts from aytm, it’s pretty revealing. I don’t know if their sample reveals a good cross-section of users, but it seems most people are interested in following celebrities, friend, and family and no so much brands or products. Sounds like bad news for Twitter advertising, but this is a trend that may be changing. We’ll ekep an eye on these Twitter trends and see what changes as 2012 unfolds.