Marketing and Management Thoughts

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks on the web. One thing people always seem to say about it is, ‘what is it for?’ To be honest it seems as though everyone has their own answer to that question. The data below does lend some insight as to how people are using the site as of this summer.

In June 2009 a survey was done on twitter by Sysomos to see how people are using twitter. The results include the following.

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• 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.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

How do power users use twitter?

Of those 5% who account for 75% of the activity they discovered that (source):

• Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.
• Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).
• 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.
• The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced with 54% male, 46% female.
• 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.
• 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.
• 44% of more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.
• 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year
• The most popular keywords within bios are Internet marketing, music lover, Web designer, video games, and husband/father.

When to post on twitter?

It is interesting to note the times of day that are most used on twitter. If you are posting something and hope others to see it is it best to be on the upside of these curves. Which would place it between 10 and noon, and then between 6 and 8pm.