Erin Lamberty pointed me towards this 'in depth look inside the Twitter world' by Sysomos, which involved the company looking at 11.5 million Twitter accounts. The full report is here, but a few key points:
- Most - in fact almost three quarters - of Twitter users joined in the first five months of this year with a particular spike in February and March.
- Something that's done the rounds a lot already, a small number of users account for the lion's share of Tweets - 5% account for 75% of activity. Assuming a user base of 30+ million worldwide, that would translate into a core of 1.5 million committed users. With Twitter having previously been tagged as the 'new Second Life' in terms of a bubble, it's worth noting that 600-700k people log onto Second Life every month (not the same as power users, whose numbers would be lower)
- 'The more followers, the more you tweet' - when you pass the 1000 followers mark your average tweets per day doubles from three to six. So Twitter works a little chicken and egg. When you start off and don't have anyone listening, the motivation to essentially talk to yourself is low. Once your follower numbers increase you imagine there is a point to using Twitter.
- As expected, the US is the biggest Twitter country by population, dwarfing all others with 62% of the total. The US is followed by the UK (8%), Canada (5%) and Australia (3%). In fact, something that struck me when doing research for a European client was how English-speaking biased Twitter is. 100+ followers is not unusual in the US, UK et al, but it is high if you look at (say) continental Europe.
- The statistics on age can be treated with a pinch of salt. Sysomos says that "65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25", which flies in the face of other studies as well as most users' personal experience. However Sysomos admits that this is based on the 0.7% who actually disclose their age on Twitter...I wasn't even aware of anyone actually doing so.
Finally, even people who call themselves social media marketers on Twitter are sometimes not as social as they make out! While 85.3% of the general Twitter population posts less than once a day, the same is true of two thirds for self proclaimed social media specialists.
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