How many people REALLY use Twitter?
And what percentage of people account for most of the activity on Twitter?
These are questions I posed on Twitter today.
I asked "Would you say that 1% of Twitter members do 99% of the tweets?"
Some answers from my followers and some of my own research has uncovered some interesting data.
There is a great deal of controversy over just how many Twitter users there really are.
A TwitterFacts blog entry from March 2008 speculates that there were over one million users at that time.
Much of this data is extrapolated from Twitterholic.com, which ranks Twitter users based on the number of followers. It tracks sign-up data and an ID number assigned by Twitter.
First, there is the question of whether or not Twitter assigns IDs sequentially or arbitrarily.
Let's assume they are sequential.
I searched Twitterholic.com for a more recent member and found @MichDe.
According to page, @MichDe is the 16,920,080th person to sign up for Twitter.
Let's say this is accurate. We can then assume that there are over 17,000,000 Twitter accounts by now.
However, many members have MULTIPLE accounts. I have four that I monitor. Only one of them is highly active. The others are for dabbling and future projects.
So let's assume that there are no more than 15,000,000 individuals who have signed up for Twitter at some point. I'm not trying to be highly scientific here, but I do want to make a point with these guestimates.
My question is really focused on participation on Twitter. Who is creating the majority of the content?
Paul Chaney writes an interesting piece explaining the following chart.
I looked at Twitterholic.com again and noticed that the top 1000 Twitterers have no more than 2500 followers.
The ranking in the top 1000 has very few "ties." That is, from #900 to #1000, the number of followers decreases from 2639 to 2455. Would it be safe to say that the next 1000 top Twitterers have at least 1000 followers? Let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the top 5000 have over 1000 followers.
From there, it has to go down.
So, let's play with some numbers...
If there are 1,000,000 Twitter accounts, the top 5000 account for the most followers. That's 1/2 of a percent.
What if there are 15,000,000 Twitter accounts?
Then those with at least 1000 followers account for .03 percent.
I know. Highly unscientific.
Still, I would have to say that 1% of Twitter members create 99% of the content.
That's a lot of lurkers and low activity individuals.
It's Del.icio.us!
Furl It!
December 17, 2008 01:38 AM
Good post.Many people join Twitter and don´t do anything with it.They don´t even make their Twitter profile look professional to get more followers.So, I would agree with you.
December 17, 2008 07:42 AM
Yes even i could observe that many people just create accounts on Twitter and do nothing. I have often found people using very popular names to join twitter (there by blocking those id's) and do nothing
December 17, 2008 08:15 AM
I wouldn't consider myself a lurker but I'm not a top twitterer. I don't want to bombard people with everything I read on the net or tell them every mundane thought that is going through my brain. But I do love the communication and it is especially thrilling when a guru like your self responds to one of my tweets or replies back. And uuhm yes that reminds me to do my profile.
December 17, 2008 10:43 AM
Let's do one type of math: I have 466 updates, 67 followers and I follow 19 people.
I have only written 1/5 of the content you have - when looking only at the number of tweets... I have roughly 1% of the number of followers you have. However, when we take into consideration that you have written 2.479 tweets for 5.723, you have written less than 1/2 a tweet per follower.
In that way you could say your followers get LESS content per person, so statistics can be manipulated anyway you like. See? :-)
December 17, 2008 11:24 AM
Thanks for the great aticle.
I love Twitter! - It is great.
Kind regards,
Saul Maraney
Johannesbueg, South Africa
www.whatishooponopono.com
December 17, 2008 11:28 AM
Thanks for the great article!
I love Twitter. - It is great.
Regards,
Saul Maraney
Johannesburg, South Africa
www.whatishooponopono.com
December 17, 2008 11:51 AM
Great post Joel! I was intrigued by @pchaney 's graph when I saw it. I am working on becoming one of the top 1%!
December 18, 2008 02:51 AM
Yes, there is allways the minority that are heavy users. I myself will propably go into the 99% category of lookers :). Great post, thanks.
December 18, 2008 11:58 AM
Hi thanks for the article. I am new to twitter in the last month and have aggressively started using it over the last week. I post regularly and have it up almost 24/7 and add content regularly. Added over 100 new followers in 1 day. I follow some who do not follow me and have contemplated deleting those that don't follow me. But on the other hand have gotten golden nuggets from a few of them. Would love of course to dominate this. Tthe ultimate of course is to create networking relationships so when I am ready with new things I am working on I can really have some great people on board to JV with me.
December 18, 2008 09:53 PM
Ok, first, no one said there'd be any math, and second, excellent analysis my friend....
M
December 21, 2008 09:04 PM
Hi Joel,
I just came across this post and thought I'd provide some raw numbers for some fun. As part of TweetStats (http://tweetstats.com/twitter_stats), I've started collecting some basic info on all Twitter updates.
For the day of Friday, December 19th, there were 1,529,368 tweets (from midnight-midnight PST). Updates were made by 310,154 users. Counting the number of tweets from 1% of that, there were 305,101 updates. Which leaves us at 1% of the users creating 19.94% of the content. Granted, that's adjusted for *active* users...so feel free to extrapolate to include the inactive users as well. (Would that be 2% of Twitter users create 100% of the content?? ;))
Feel free to ping me if you want to run some more numbers through. :)
December 21, 2008 10:44 PM
You speculate (or calculate) that "1% of Twitter members do 99% of the tweets" and that 90% are lurkers.
First, I doubt that 90% are even bothering to lurk. People register to look around and then do nothing.
In any cohort, if it is active, it is wonderful if a full percentage point is doing stuff - truly active. So, what is active?
!% of 15 million is still 150K. That's a lot of people, and if they were truly active in their tweeting, that's a very active community. Without doing an analysis, my sense is that the total active community of Twitter is smaller than 150K. (Yes, I am guessing.)
So, what quantity of activity makes a person 'active?' Would 3 tweets/week be active? Once per month? I suspect that number-of-tweets misses the point.
I suggest that 'active' means involving followers, and somehow causing part of this community to notice you and even care about what you have to say. To achieve this, it might be more effective to have a series of related tweets on one day, and then simply go unnoticed for a few days than to have a single daily tweet -- even though in each case the number of tweets might be the same.
As I think about this, I'm suggesting that the value of tweeting is in the ability to touch other people. Followship might be a useful metric for analyzing this, but I suspect that measuring it might require some other research.
Tweeting without being read is like the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one is there to hear.
December 24, 2008 04:17 AM
I am just starting with twitter, and I must say that it can be addictive. I have a couple of hundreds followers. Like 10 or so per day, without me doing anything.
It's great.
Franck.
December 24, 2008 09:57 AM
Interesting thoughts presented here...
On my limited list, I see some that tweet quite a bit,
conversely, there are those who rarely tweet.
I'd liken it to "Grand Central Station",
where you might have times that there are scads of
people coming through - some interacting with the
others, and some just passing through, on their
way to some place else. Anyone who has been to GCS
has seen (or heard) a great deal of things going on,
and either paid attention, or moved on, or even
contributed...
Be Well!
ECS Dave
March 25, 2009 06:03 PM
Based on Twitterholic.com I'm somewhere in the 22,000. An based on my calculation that if there are 17mil twitterers, then I'm doing pretty well for myself. Hmm, I really don't know what my calculations proved, but whatever, I know that I'm a twitterholic, that's for sure.