Oh, the burdens of popularity. We already know that most people on Twitter are sheep with few followers and who don’t Tweet much. But what about the rams? If you want to lead a flock on Twitter, you need to be heard. People with 100 followers send out an average of 2.4 Tweets per day, while those with 1,800 followers Tweet an average of 10.2 a day, according to a new study by Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto. The inflection point seems to be between 800 followers (2.8 Tweets a day) and 1,000 followers (6.4 Tweets a day).
The more followers you have, the more you Tweet. Perhaps once people attract a large enough audience they feel obligated to keep them entertained. More likely, the more you Tweet the more followers you get, provided you actually have something interesting to say. As it turns out, not everybody uses Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. Many people simply tune in passively and skim their feeds. Sysomos looked at 11.5 million Twitter accounts and concluded that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce 86 percent of the Tweets (which closely matches a Harvard Business School study that estimates the top 10 percent of Twitter users do 90 percent of the Tweeting). It is even more concentrated than that. The Sysomos data indicates that the top 5 percent of people on Twitter account for 75 percent of all Tweets.
More broadly, 50 percent of people on Twitter send out updates less than once a week. But 36 percent of the accounts Sysomos tracks send out Tweets every single day. So about a third of people on Twitter are fairly active, dedicated users. While half are more passive desk potatoes, Tweeting less than once a week.
These numbers are actually higher than the activity suggested by other recent reports. For instance, TweetGrade found that 29 percent of Twitter accounts in its sample have zero followers (same link as above). Sysomos, on the other hand, found a much lower percentage of accounts with zero followers: only 7 percent. And it counts 21 percent of users who have never posted a Tweet (Ironically, 65.5 percent of people who identify themselves as social media marketers have never posted an update). These discrepancies may be due to the way Sysomos gathered data on those 11.5 million accounts. It indexed Twitter starting with a core set of accounts and then spreading out to all of their followers and followees. Dead accounts or spam accounts with 0 followers and 0 Tweets would be less likely to be picked up this way. All of the data is as of mid-May.
The study also broke down the market share of Twitter clients, both desktop and mobile. More than half of all users (55 percent) use a Twitter app. The most popular way to use Twitter is through the Website (45 percent), followed by TweetDeck (19 percent). Twitterfon and Tweetie are the two most popular mobile apps and the No. 3 and No. 5 most popular ways to use Twitter overall, with 4.5 percent and 3.7 percent market share, respectively. Twitterfeed, which people use to submit RSS feeds to Twitter and which was purchased today by Betaworks, was the No. 4 client with 3.8 percent share. (Here are more up-to-date cient usage stats from TwitStat).
All your questions will be answered when the Chinese app is released.
“More likely, the more you Tweet the more followers you get, provided you actually have something interesting to say.”
Interesting?
On Twitter?
Really?
,,,,
It’s quite true to some extent. When i joined i was not very active on Twitter then and also as my followers grew I started tweeting more and more every day.
I have found that the more I tweet about useful topics, the more followers come out of the woodwork and follow me. I don’t find that having more followers causes me to tweet more. Out of all the followers I have, I probably really get a chance to interact or have a 2 way conversation with a very small subset. This is not on purpose, but its just the way its been so far.
I agree with your article.
There’s no doubt that tweeting more often brings you more organic followers. Really, ‘tweeting’ is the only way to build organic followers. What this report and the article doesn’t mention is the skew in any stat analysis from what I call the “1:1 tweeters”, those who are using the tried and tested route to building large numbers of followers by using a follow many, then unfollow routine.
It is simple.. you create a twitter account.. you go to twitback make a twitter background. You then go to twittercounter.com. Follow a 1000 people. This is your daily limit. Wait 2 days.. then go to buzzom.com flush anyone that is not following you and repeat. At 2000 users you reach the ratio protection twitter has. Now I have tested this part by I imagine if you flushed a 1000 people you are following and then follow a 1000 new you could continue to grow without people noticing.
Don’t expect any of these followers to be worthwhile. They are just twitter marketers like you.. so tweeting is nice but it is not needed to get followers.
Thank you for this theoretical and statistical analysis of Twitter Sheep and Rams. Is it the chicken or the egg? Do we tweet more because we have more followers or are we leaders because we tweet more?
Only time will tell.
Debby, Homeopathy World Community
The More Followers You Have, The More You Tweet !! ask me….
(11,801 followers till now)
more followers –> bigger ego –> more tweets
sorry to say Erick but these market share numbers are just entirely wrong, as much as any available out there.
may I suggest you contact Twitter for better sources?
Loic, how do you know they are just entirely wrong?
oh dear, oh dear..
I found out why. Obviously, it’s because they showed that Seesmic which is apparently your company has a tiny share..
and Loic, why do you even think Twitter might respond?
Twitter has to be used properly {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/3kues0aJNX_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Twitter has to be used properly ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/d67FpoUkZU”}}}
This would be nice if the followers were not out just to follow and stop following. But I figure if you can build a follower count of 20,000 (more than half being some kind of marketing ploy) you still can get your word out there. If you have a pretty good design you could also gain a loyal following just because your twitter looks good. Yikes!!! I better work on mine.
Nice report.
Many of my friends registered a twitter account but did not do anything. Until they get some followers, they got more active to tweet and try to get more followers.
it seems this is the rule of this tweeting games – Getting more followers rather than spreading/getting more useful information.
imo tweeting more brings more followers for the reasons stated by others. however, those who tweet a lot are more likely to be thought leaders in social media and thus attract large followings. just look at all the twitter users associated with blogs. plus, if you’re big in the social networking space then you can garner followers from other areas of the web, and again, are more likely to tweet a lot from being active
Erick – great analysis here and many thanks for shout out to our study. We just wanted to point out one interesting thing about your first graph. There are a lot of people with few followers and very few people with many followers. So the average for people with few followers hides a lot of differences in tweeting activity – some people will tweet a lot, others will tweet nothing and all you see is the average of many people.
See below what happens when look at the underlying data used to generate these averages and you plot tweets/day against followers for a sample of individual Twitter users:
Now, it’s hard to see any relationship between # of follower and tweets/day (we checked for a bunch of specifications and could not find any relationships)… also, quite a lot of people seem to be talking when few people are listening.
These graphs plot exactly what they state, averages overall. Sysomos has the data to plot refined details on any of these graphs. Please post your requests to #sysomossurvey and we will be happy to include them in the next iteration of our report. All the best
It’s an old saying
“A true man always lives upto people’s expectations”
I think it exactly fits into this case, as more and more people expects quick updates from you more you get active and keep them involved with you.
So honestly am not surprised by research findings.
@Erick Schonfeld: frankly the research data provided is really good, some good findings.
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT
Once u got 100 followers ur on ya way to 200. Getting 1000 will double if you content is worthwhile to your followers. I use the hashtag #FFVIP and go to the mutual followback list to get users. They all follow back and make your account look good. Try it at http://bit.ly/ffvip It helped me get 300 then I told them to share me with their friends. Check me out on twitter at @FFVIP Follow Fridays are great with them!
Sometimes saying less is more meaningful. Whats the purpose of thousands of people besides social ranking….sometimes its not the content that people are interested but its more the I tweet you, you tweet me-follower-thing. “A fool with a tool is still a fool”…. See you on twitter
#seewoester
It’s more about response. Not much motivation to tweet if you get no response. I got very little response until I crossed the 1,000 followers barrier.
Plus, it has to be followers that care about what you tweet about. I talk about heavy music mostly, so SEO and tech people don’t respond. However, once I found my target audience I got tons of replies. That made me want to tweet more.
My activity depends on my frame of mind, what I’m doing and whether I feel the contribution adds value. I follow a level that I can maintain, so I suppose I will never be considered a Ram
I agree with you. I often only tweet once per day, but I try hard to keep my twitter voice steady and make meaningful tweets. Nevertheless, the number of people who follow me has been steadily growing.
yes, off course you tweet more, mathematics
so i agree with your article. And a very good study that was on twiiter by Harvard
Hey
Great article, excellent facts and figures but surley it is to do with quality and not quantity.
Gary Vaynerchuk probably tweets less than most but he really does deliver.
Regards
Mark
who is the best?
facebook vs twitter at:
http://www.vspo....aspx?pollid=20
One interesting thing — over the last three months the growth I see is in the number of followers of many members. People who had 100 have 1000 and people who had 1000 have 10,000. What this means I am not sure but I suspect it plays havoc with any effort to fully understand the phenomenon. Maybe it is a truly participatory medium which validates the value of communicating concisely.
IMHO it’s a self fueling cycle. The more followers you have the more interesting conversations you have to engage in so you tweet more. Take a look at tweetstats and you’ll see it’s quite common for people to tweet more as their follow/follower relationships grow. Of course the more interesting conversations you’re in, the more exposed you are to new people and you get more followers too.
Too bad there isn’t a way to gauge qualitatively. We’re actually trying to tweet less, so we don’t risk boring followers.
After all, the hyper-inflated, pumped-up popularity of some accounts doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything interesting going on.
And is it boring tweets that cause people to unfollow? Or do people unfollow just to “flush” those who don’t follow back?
I agree wit you, the more followers you get you feel obligated to tweet more
Interesting and when you think about it, also logically
The more followers you have, the more you have to craft an interesting message to your audience.
Useful analysis of how MUCH people are Twittering. We recently did a study analyzing WHAT PEOPLE ARE TWITTERING ABOUT as a related to a live event (we hand coded close to a thousand tweets):
http://blog.pat...ter-events.html
These are fascinating numbers. I already wrote a post on some other Twitter numbers, http://bit.ly/rDgmp, but will take a look at these for future work.
Interesting data analysis. While we may be able to pull together an answer in regression, I think the trend is purely organic…the users with the most followers are the most active. I don’t necessarily think that it is a conscious action or obligation.
It would be interesting to overlay some kind of ‘velocity’ metric; viewing the daily growth of followers by the number of tweets per day. My guess is the users with the greatest ‘follower velocity’ are driving the averages in their respective categories.
I think it stands to reason that the more followers you have the more likely you are to tweet because the level of engagement is higher. The more you tweet, the higher your level of attention and, therefore, the more likely you are to pick up more followers. Then, with more followers — more engagement, more tweeting, more attention – it’s a natural progression sort of thing.
Glad to be in the top bracket.