Sysomos recently published some nice research on Twitter statistics in 2010 compared to 2009. The highlights of this research shows:
Users with more than 100 friends have increased by three-fold to 21% since 2009.
• 22.5% of users accounted for about 90% of all tweets.
• 80% users have made fewer than 500 tweets.
• Justin Bieber is one of top two-word phrases and top
name in user’s bios.
• Significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio
and web information in Twitter profiles.
So it has been a good year for Twitter in which they probably doubled their number of members. What got my attention in the publication was this graph:
This graph shows that 58.3% of all tweets are produced by by only 2.2% of all users, that’s right, 2 in every hundred Twitter users account for more than 58 of every 100 tweets. Now I do know some hyper active Tweeters but this was kinda shocking, who are those 2.2%? Are they human? Is something wrong with them?
As usual I did some ‘thorough’ research and of course found that a lot of the tweets generated by the 2.2% minority are actually automatic feed generators, just like @tweet_the_time. Tweet_the_time already posted more than 200.000 tweets communicating the time and actually has 302 followers. Now besides the fact that that makes me re-think my twitter strategy I also wonder, why do people follow this user that every 3 minutes tweets the time, something your computer, phone, watch and alarm-clock will tell you? Apparently quality tweets are way much overrated. Where I thought freshness, uniqueness and relevance of my tweets will gain followers it seems that sheer volume in tweets is more successful.
On the other hand there are actual people in the top 20 of most active users like Mike Hanes. Mike is an IT recruiter located in Dallas and a busy guy who managed to produce more than 300.000 tweets in his Twitter life. Now I’m pretty sure Mike has some help of feed generators but he’s still an extremely active twitter user and I have to say he knows his Twitter stuff considering his almost 7.000 followers.
So hyper activity on Twitter seems to pay off which calls for an old fashioned try-it-yourself-research conducted by Sangat Pedas. The next weeks I’ll boost up the activity on my Twitter account using external relevant feeds to see whether users appreciate it and the growth in followers will accelerate. The follower counter starts at 210.
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