Data Monday: Twitter Stats

by August 17, 2009

Recent numbers on Twitter's usage and growth:

  • Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009 (source)
  • In August 2009, Twitter is still growing but not at the breakneck pace of the past. Compete has it at 23.2mm US uniques, up just 1.25% from the month before. Visits are up 1.64% month to month. (source)
  • With 20 million of its visitors coming from the U.S., Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international. (source)
  • There are fewer young people on Twitter than on the Internet as a whole: one quarter of US Internet users are under 25, Nielsen says, but only 16% of Twitter users lie in that age range. Additionally over 90% of TweetDeck users are over 25. (source)
  • 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity. (source)
  • 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. (source)
  • 24% or one-quarter of all tweets overall, are generated by these very active bots (source)
  • 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day. (source)
  • 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009 (source)
  • 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day (source)
  • 21% of users have never posted a Tweet (source)
  • Content within Twitter posts can be classified as 40.5% pointless babble, 37.5% conversational and 8.7% having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stand at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively. (source: a short-term study)
  • 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people (source)
  • 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. (source)
  • There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%) (source)
  • As Twitter users attract more followers, they tend to Tweet more often. This is particularly evident once someone has 1,000 followers the average number of Tweets/day climb from three to six. (source)
  • You post more on Twitter if you have more followers, that is, until about 300 followers. Then you reach saturation and there is suddenly a lot of variation in the number of posts. (source)
  • There are two different types of links between people on Twitter, friendships and followship - friendship establishes you as a friend with a higher degree of sharing, while following just means you're listening to the tweets of the person followed. (source)
  • Even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e., anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends (source)
  • 11.44% of referral traffic to Twitter is from Facebook. 9.94% is from Google. 5.08% is from Yahoo! (source)