How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. (Full report embedded below). But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.
HubSpot’s State of the Twittersphere report is inspired by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which tries to quantify trends across all the blogs it tracks. HubSpot gets its data from Twitter Grader, a site it operates that generates a grade for Twitter users based on factors such as how many followers they have, the reach of the people who are following them, and how often they post updates.
Twitter Grader is basically a vanity search site for Twitter, but it has managed to compile data on over 500,000 Twitter accounts, which is probably around 10 percent of the total. It is not clear how representative these users are, but it is a large sample and they certainly are not all power users. (Three percent had 0 followers, 9 percent didn’t follow anyone else, and 22 percent had five or fewer followers). Until Twitter releases its own State of the Twittersphere report, this is as good as the data gets.
Some other key stats from the report:
—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days
So it is pretty much all newbies, and mainstream adoption is just getting started.
—The most popular days of the week to Tweet are Wednesday and Thursday
—An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are registered each day.
—Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
—Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
—22 percent have five or fewer followers
—Another 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers
Similarly, most people don’t follow more than 25 other people. In fact, 30 percent follow the Tweets of five or fewer other members. Again, 11 to 25 seems to be a sweet spot, with 21 percent users following that many others. Here’s is the breakdown:
State of the Twittersphere - Get more Information Technology
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Readwriteweb is saying that the report is being published tomorrow. Is the actual report decent or is this from the press release?
Did someone break an embargo? Naughty, naughty…
Yes, looks like RRW is playing the embargo-busting game also. Come one, come all.
I’ve embedded the report.
Please tell me it pained you to have to use the word “twittersphere.” http://bit.ly/17nPk
That is an awesome article you posted and very interesting. I was just telling someone about twitter today, whom I’ll send this too. I’m one of those LinkedIn users with thousands of connections because I’m in recruiting and it helps me in my business. Not the case with Twitter. I see those elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers or the ones following more than 100. That’s insane and quickly explains why a majority choose only to follow and be followed by a small number of peers or friends. As an interactive media, more would seem to me to be totally unmanageable.
This report rings true for what has been happening this year on Twitter - it’s reached a tipping point and now the mainstream is about to hit. iphone 3g and mobile Twittering probably helped. Here’s hoping it can cope with the onslaught of everyone else jumping in.
I don’t quite agree… twitter is still very niche and to be frank… I have yet to see the value for non-business applications. Much of the tweets are trivial at best as well… who cares what you ate for breakfast or that you are on your way to McDonalds?
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
this is a fantastic set of numbers and analysis. which begs the question, when you are going to add a ‘twitter account’ as part of the comment form?
I’m a Twitter ho (w/1886 followers), quickly becoming a Facebook Connect ho, please follow me there =)
http://twitter.com/MarkMayhew
Hmm… Maybe we should open up all of our twitterholic.com data. We’ve got a metric s ton of it.
You should. Send it to me first
Interesting article but it offers nothing actionable that you could actually use.
Why am I not even remotely startled to see this posted well before the “embargo,” heh.
I’ve been telling my friends that Twitter is so hot right now you’d be crazy not to be on it.
It’s an amazing social networking tool with strong search engine attributes.
I hope to creep out of the 1001-2500 bracket by the end of this week.
Please add me on Twitter if you’d like some help or advice on how to maximize it for your business:
http://www.twitter.com/mr_gadget
Fantastic overview! I wonder what % of those following 50 or fewer are even active? I’d expect it to skew the interpretation slightly.
These are the first stats I’ve seen on twitter. Interesting that in 2008, 70% of the twitter users joined. Should be interesting to see if the curve continues through next year.
http://twitter.com/greenbydesign
I agree this is going to pick up fast by march there will be a huge increase.
Twitter is UP 640% for the year as per compete.com so once it goes mainstream watch out
(like Oprah plugs it)
POsitioning is KEY right now, I just taught my members advanced twitter strategies today as i have been testing tweaking & tracking & it is converting like mad for new optins and sales
come follow me if you are not allready technically i am the video queen but i know all about twitter and facebook and what works and doesnt work good luck guys!
Maria ANdros
“The Video Marketing QUeen”
It’s interesting to start to see the results of sites such as Twitter. While it’s a social media phenomenon, it was hard to measure stats when there wasn’t too much to compare to. I’m surprised at the 20% that signed up recently, that’s a pretty big new user percentage!
Interesting stats… I guess this graph explains why twitter is always operating at full capacity, and regularly gives me those service warnings… I can’t even fathom how resource intensive twitter must be…
uh, i have hundreds of followers and feel that everybody i follow also has hundreds (so people like guy kawasaki follow me, but isn’t it a bot executing the follow?), so is there a demographics or sector layer to this report, or is it just culling crap from the api and spitting out charts and graphs? if it’s the latter, then i’m already yawning…
http://www.twitter.com/passingnotes
I’d say that easily half of my ~500 Followers are simply bots, orphaned accounts, or reciprocal follows that I’ve since un-followed.
That’s one heckuva hockey stick.
At what point are Twitter follows on par with MySpace “friends” you never interact with or that never see your stream?
Jay,
Twitter cleans out most bots every couple of weeks. The last clean up happened a couple of days ago. I know because I lost around 200 followers.
What you have now should be a good representation of humans following you
I’d also like to know if this is active users or all users — and how active is defined, if the former. Boatloads of people sign up, follow a couple of people, are followed back by a couple, fail to see the point, and don’t stick around.
Karen, there’s a great peer-reviewed study by HP Labs folk that does a good job of looking at this stuff: http://bit.ly/8Ril.
-dw
@Wion
Kind of stupid that the first graph has percentages to the left instead of total user numbers imo
If you look at the full PDF report, we used the percentages rather than raw numbers because the exact number of user accounts on Twitter is not known accurately.
Based on our sample of 600,000 accounts, we can show the implied growth of Twitter, but we were not confident to put a stake in the ground and say that there were exactly X Twitter users, without more accurate data. But we are pretty confidnet about the overall growth curve shape.
wooo hooo, proud to be in the top 1%
hey man i loved you on wall street warriors.
…i’ve been a long time naysayer but now a converted twitterholic…Techcrunch is to blame for all their masturbatory coverage..
it figures
I’m surprised at the results….but thankful to be in the top 5% with over 250 followers and in the .8% w/over 1000 followers.
I’m actually surprised with those numbers. Most Twitter profiles I visit tend to have at least 100 followers or more. However I don’t believe that Twitters stats on the user profiles for the amount of followers you have is totally accurate.
I myself have had dramatic changes in the amount of followers i have/had within a matter of hours. However thankfully I’m still in the top few percent, and I continue to Tweet all day.
Nice figures, offtopic: could docstoc and scribd please merge !
Twitter has become a platform that is being used by applications.
Could they monetize the re-use of their platform?
twitter rocks really ,i guess it gonna grow much faster
I finally jumped into the Twitter waters this past summer, and very glad I did. You don’t get it, to quote a Washington Post slogan “if you don’t get it”. Facebook and other social networks are great places to post things and organize into groups. But the ‘live conversation’ is happening on Twitter.
And all of those mundane ‘Tweets’ people keep poo pooing are just ways folks get to know each other. Twitter is also a fantastic information stream, one I dip into all day long to discover interesting and relevant blog posts and breaking news.
As for brands, they’re discovering that Twitter is a customer contact channel, one they can monitor for brand keyword mentions, one they can use to help active customers and connect with potential ones.
I’m especially interested in enterprise apps, like Present.ly (from Intridea), that act as an internal Twitter on steroids, to help good ideas and key employees bubble to the top.
You can find me chatting with 2000+ followers at:
http://Twitter.com/BrickandClick
Interesting how my Twitter account (@amabaie fits into the stats. Twitter Grader had me at 94 a few days ago. I see that my number of followers is up around 95%, and yes I got posted my first tweet only about three months ago.
Why not report the median, instead of the average for users below some arbitrary cutoff? I hate made-up statistics.
I’ve a Twitter account for about 8 months, and I still don’t understand the appeal. I have about 60 people following at this point, and I can’t imagine why.
This stats seem to fall in line with a Power Law Curve. Clay Shirky describes theory in relation to social networks in his book “Here Comes Everybody”. Its quite interesting.
Just went past 1500 followers, so I guess that makes me a somebody according to those stats. Right on.
Not too surprised with the data. I’ve been seeing my own numbers rise steadily. I started my account back in March ‘07, and quit using it for about a year. Didn’t see the point, honestly. But then started really using it about 3 months ago - since then, i’ve gotten 2 jobs and several hundred ‘fans’, and been nominated for a shortyaward in #science. So ya, I’d have to say that good things are coming to me, from my ‘work’ with twitter.
As it grows, so does my personal/professional network.
great report, i like the metrics.
Take care.
mjl
twitter.com/mlaine
“Space Elevator Guy”
Great numbers. I don’t know if they say anything about how valuable and lasting is the “Twitter Content”.
I’m just curious … how does any of this translate into revenue for Twitter?
It doesn’t. I still think Twitter’s revenue (and more importantly, profitability) model is quite uncertain.
…and when the profit fails to materialize where does that put millions’o faithful birdies? Singing sad songs, that’s what.
Twitter will have to offend to make money. Something ugly. Something rude. I can’t imagine even the mindless twitter-stricken masses paying money to tell 52 saps they’re buying Cheetos.
ya everyone make it as source of traffic diversion,
Millions of twitter accounts would easily reduce into, perhaps, 731 accounts. This number, snatched from the nebulous cloud of whim, factors in a broad range of human differences, tastes and what-have-you.
Beyond this we have cataclysmic repetition differentiated only by ugly-mug avatars.
Excellent summary and data. This is very interesting and must be very useful - (even if it is not actionable}. Twitter is such a simple concept, yet it has mass appeal and can be used in so many different and interactive ways; from the trivial to newsbreaking, earthshaking events. You get as much out of it as you put into it. The more people you follow the richer your stream is.
Follow me at @chrisloft if you like.
I am one of the “newbies” that has joned in the last 60 days. I’ve been struggling to try and get it, as I’m sure many of the new entrants are. Going to try and chronicle my adventures in undestanding and assimilating social media into my world. Follow me @sstewart949.
I’m going to throw this comment out there with the expectation that no one at TechCrunch will actually answer my question (although I would appreciate it if you would).
How many of these users are ACTIVE Twitter users? That’s really all that matters.
interesting to see how these numbers progress in 2009. http://www.interspire.com/cont.....g-Now.html claims there are about 3 million tweets each day.
Great article and i’m looking forward to see what twitter has in store for us in 2009
http://www.twitter.com/dustinwashere
http://www.ignitesocialmedia.c.....mment-1901
http://www.ignitesocialmedia.c.....sis-report