How many people use Twitter? Many fewer than Twitter would lead you to believe.
According to its "about" page, Twitter has 175 million registered users. But "registered users" is a funny term. What it really means is the number of accounts. So, according to Twitter, 175 million Twitter accounts have been opened during Twitter's history.
That's nice to know, but it doesn't really answer our question, does it? Fleshed-out a bit, our question is: How many individuals are active users of Twitter?
Facebook has a simple answer to this question. It says 600 million people visit Facebook each month, and that half come back every day.
Twitter doesn't share this number.
Fortunately, we know someone with full access to Twitter's API. Even more fortunate, this person took it upon himself to have an engineer write up some code and actually count the real number of users on Twitter.
Well, that's sort of what he did. What he actually did was look at follower/following statistics, to see how many users are following or are followed by a certain number of people.
Using data that is now just one month old, he found out that…
- There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts.
- There were 85 million accounts with one or more followers.
With these figures, and Twitter's claim of 175 million accounts, a little subtraction shows us that there are 56 million Twitter accounts following zero other accounts, and 90 million Twitter accounts with zero followers.
Those are some interesting figures, because they show us Twitter is much smaller than the "175 million!" number might lead us to believe.
But they still don't answer our question: How many active users does Twitter have?
To get close to answering that question with this data, we have to take a guess at how many accounts an "active" Twitter user follows.
At Facebook, a company source tells us, they believe that a user is not going to end up sticking around unless they make friends with 10 people.
So let's say an "active" Twitter user is someone who follows at least 10 other accounts.
How many such "active" Twitter users are there? Our source's API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.
Your author, by the way, follows 700 people. There are only 1.5 million accounts on Twitter following 512 or more accounts.
Some context:
- Facebook has more than 600 million monthly active users.
- Foursquare has 7.5 million registered users.
- The Huffington Post reaches 30 million people each month.
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ONLY? In other words,Twitter has more 1.5 million super power users. I'd say that's an impressive number.
Twitter is NOT worth billions. What a joke.
I ask because I often wonder if social media is just a playground for the few or it is a a place that will take longer for it to become a "mainstream" medium?
For goodness sakes people's great grandmothers and the President of the United States has an active Twitter account.
If that's not mainstream enough for you, perhaps you would like to argue the point of how there is a growing population of fishers who simply cannot swim?
And that right there is perhaps the most meaningless stat of them all. Following does not mean READING.
I Follow, right now, 404, and that's high. And I *read* the damn tweets that come in. Do you?
I follow slightly more than 100 people, and I'm constantly having to prune that back when people start posting too much. Anything above 200 follows is almost unmanageable, IMO.
Someone may have opened an account years ago and followed 500 users and then stopped using Twitter. Just like I did. So how many other inactive accounts are there?
I interpret the data differently. Perhaps a headline TWITTER IS DAMN BIG would be more apt.
The act of following 1000+ people is past the point of taking Twitter outside conversation and social network and begins to make your stream kind of watered down and meaningless. My guess is that a large number of those people with 512 or more rarely read their stream. I'd also guess that far more activity happens by users who are below that number than above it.
Interesting article.
And I will Follow You
All The Days and Nights
http://twitter.com/jabailo
That could be a better sign of activity (no url requirement could removes link spam accounts, follow/followed removes people who post once to see what goes on and never return)
it is good to know these numbers but you must have had some luck spotting spam accounts with following many folds more than followers
How Many active Users Does foursquare REALLY Have ?
Probably 200k that check 2 times a week...
Interesting article, but I think you are leaving out some major players here. There are plenty of people on Twitter that don't necessarily follow a lot of people but have HUGE followings themselves and post regularly. I think a better metric would be a formula which includes number of tweets, retweets, etc...not just followers if you want to get a grasp on "active" Twitter users.
If it's to compare against Facebook's pre-eminence in the social media arena I would have said this was self evident.
I wish there was a Twitter watch using 3G or WiMAX.
Using the date of the user's last status update might be a better indication of active use.
suppose i signed up JUST to follow people.. does that render me inactive? i may NEVER tweet. EVER. but perhaps i signed up to follow tons of people just for the info... not to interact, retweet or post any of my own thoughts...so again.
DEFINE ACTIVE.
point is there are MILLIONS of people on twitter. doing what they do and how they do it ..
for the record though i would consider myself active.. follow me if you dare ..
@daviskoresh
have a wonderful day
On the reverse, there are some people who are very picky about who THEY follow, yet are very prolific posters, and have thousands-to-millions of followers. (See Conan O'Brien.)
I would suggest a two-fold definition of "active":
1. Follows at least 10 accounts - each of which have at least 10 posts.
OR
2. Is followed by at least 10 other accounts - and has at least 10 posts.
By allowing both definitions to define "active", you cover both 'consumers' and 'producers', while not ruling 'consume-only' or 'produce-only' accounts.
I would also add that for 'producer-heavy' accounts, if no production has happened in 'x' period of time (2 years?) it should be declared inactive. (For example, the CEO of my company stopped posting to his personal Twitter account 2 years ago in favor of using the "company official" account.)
even with some higher numbers, one of them is probably someone with a lot of followers. means the tactic to advertise on twitter is a good one... not much in the feed means people are more likely to read the tweet even weeks later because their timeline doesnt change.
but considering that following one person or every less than 10 is probably a not very active account. i would guess twitter has around 10m "active" accounts who post more than once a week. all the other 110 million dont use it or follow a couple people and check it out every once in a while without posting anything.
thats my guess based on how myspace went down slowly over two years and how irrelevant a single tweet of a public figure is for your daily live vs. the pictures of the newborn of your sister on facebook.