Over the past five months, Twitter has seen tremendous growth and, in the process, attracted a huge amount of media and blog coverage.
To quantify this growth, Sysomos decided to conduct a study that involved collecting information from 11.5 million Twitter accounts. We believe it’s the most extensive look at Twitter ever done, offering in-depth insight into Twitter’s growth and how people use it.
Among the findings are that:
• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools – mobile and Web-based – other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
The complete report on Twitter can be found online on our Web site, as well as a PDF version for download. A complete list of all graphs and charts, in addition to those in the main report, are available in the appendix to the Inside Twitter report.
More: TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld did a blog post on the report.
(Disclosure: I’m a paying client of Sysomos).
Awesome analysis…this report is a must-read and really shows of your capabilities well. How confident are you in the age breakdown since there really isn’t a spot to put age in your Twitter profile?
Great Job! But for me there is still one graph missing: Could you combine the data out of “How old are twitter users” and “What sex have twitter users” to an overall “population pyramid” of the twitter-nation?
But anyways: great analysis!
@David – Some people disclose their ages in their bio fields, e.g., a 22 yr old web designer from Queens, which is picked up by our parsers (along with many similar variations). However only 0.6% have disclosed their ages of 11.5 million users.
[...] wisten we al. Hier kun je een klein onderzoek naar wat feiten en cijfers zien gedaan door Symosos. http://blog.sysomos.com/2009/06/11/an-in-depth-exploration-of-twitter/ [...]
Great Report, i was trying to get some similar information through Twitter Api but i couldn’t so far.
I would love to know the TOTAL users by country for the whole world. Do you think you could publish this information? I’m Argentinian living in Mexico, and none of this countries are listed
I think this can be very helpfull for SEO and Marketing strategies, in other words, does it make sense to invest in Twitter marketing in Latinamerica? apparently only Brazil “uses” twitter.
[...] Twitter üzerine analiz (11,5 milyon Twitter kullanıcısından faydalanılmış) [...]
Great report amazing amounts of data, thank you!!!
Great report – very interesting.
I’m curious re: methodology – how did you select the 11.5 M accounts? Why did you choose to analyze that large a number, and not just the entire Twitter population?
(And on a related note, do you have a “current total number of Twitter users” estimate?)
@Matt We continuously crawl for Twitter data, trying to gather as much data as we can. When we produced the report, during the end of May, we had 11.5M user profiles in our database. While it is impossible for people outside Twitter to know the actual total number, it was rumored to be around 14M at the time. This means our crawlers were over 82% effective in terms of coverage.
Sorry I don’t have the current number handy, but it can be computed. We plan to release regular updates to the Inside Twitter report with updated statistics.
[...] Twitter içeriğinin %90′ını, kullanıcıların %10′u oluşturuyormuş. [...]
Thanks, great Twitter stats.
Note that in your summary, you incorrectly use the word less when you should have used the word fewer on several occasions.
Explanation:
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000214.htm
I.e., followers would be a counted item, thus you should say fewer than followers.
Feel free to delete my comment if you fix the grammatical error.
Thanks for the interesting data.
I´ve never expected, that the tweeple are such young. In Germany the tweeple seems to be 25+ in general.
Thankyou for sharing this interesting data.
I calculated the distribution of followers count for a (much smaller) sample of users from the public timeline. This distribution looks different to the one you find for all users – which is not surprising, as for a start the public timeline only includes users that tweeted at least once. However, intriguingly, it looks quite similar to the distribution you find for Internet Marketers.
Could you please tell me how you identified your data set of Internet Marketers? Did it only include marketers who had tweeted at least once?
@Miranda we looked at many user accounts, including the ones without any tweet. The internet marketers were identified based on what was disclosed in their bio.
If you use the public timeline, this method is inherently biased towards who tweet more. You can not get the uniform random sample that way, and probably the reason for the difference.
This is a fascinating and very comprehensive study. Thank you for sharing.
I just have a word of caution about drawing causal relationships where you see correlations – for example, you state, “As Twitter users attract more followers, they tend to Tweet more often,” I would argue that as you tweet more often, you are more likely to draw more followers. Logically too it makes more sense to say that the more you tweet the more followers you will have because you are likely to be an interesting person if you have so much to say, instead of the other way round, where I will feel more compelled to tweet because I have more followers now.
Either way if it is only correlations you are studying, it is hard to make causal statements unless you did other tests that are not reflected here.
Shalini Bahl
@ShaliniBahl
@Shalini point well taken. In fact the followup on Techcrunch has focused on this aspect – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/10/the-more-followers-you-have-the-more-you-tweet-or-is-it-the-other-way-around/
Great analysis. Posted about one of your insights. @bellalychow
93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people. I am glad I have more than 200 followers!
This is a very interesting research project. Thanks