Twitter Contribution Studies

by September 10, 2009

I’ve recently been analyzing several Twitter usage studies for my Impact of Social Models talk at IDEA09. Since most of these studies explore similar questions, I thought it would be interesting to look at the similarities (and differences) in their answers.

Contribution
  • 5% of users account for 75% of all activity (June 2009 study of 11.5M users)
  • 10% account for 86% of activity (June 2009 study of 11.5M users)
  • 10% account for 90% of activity (May 2009 study of 300,542 users)
Frequency
  • 85.3% of users update less than once a day (June 2009 study of 11.5M users)
  • Average user updates .97 times a day (June 2009 study of 4.5M users)
  • Average user updates .37 times per day activity (May 2009 study of 300,542 users)
Conversations
  • 37.55% of updates are directed “@” communication (August 2009 study of 2,000 updates)
  • 37.95% of updates are directed “@” communication (June 2009 study of 4.5M users)
  • 25.4% of updates are directed “@” communication (January 2009 study of 309,740 users)
  • 8.7% of updates are re-tweets (August 2009 study of 2,000 updates)
  • 1.4% of updates are re-tweets (June 2009 study of 4.5M users)
Inactivity
  • 21% of users have never posted an update (June 2009 study of 11.5M users)
  • 54.88% of users have never posted an update (June 2009 study of 4.5M users)
  • 50.4 % of users have not updated status in past 7 days (June 2009 study of 11.5M users)
  • Over 50% of users have not posted an update in past 74 days activity (May 2009 study of 300,542 users)
Sources