The state of the Twittersphere....

I came across a great study by Hubspot today entitled 'The state of the Twittersphere'

The report centers around the activity of people of Twitter such as; dormant accounts, average tweets per day, average number of followers etc and gives a great overview of the usage of Twitter today...

Below are some of the main highlights i have picked out:

Twitter user base stats

In an effort to quantify exactly how many dormant accounts exist, they labeled users as inactive if they satisfy all of the following conditions:

• Fewer than 10 followers
• Fewer than 10 friends
• Fewer than 10 updates

By this definition, 9.06% of all Twitter users are inactive.

• 24.14% of users have a bio in their profile
• 31.32% of users have a location in their profile
• 20.21% of users have a homepage URL in their profile
• 45.12% of users have tweeted at least once
• 47.29% of users have at least one follower
• 44.50% of users are following at least one account


Though they have noticed that those users who are actively using Twitter do so on a regular basis.

• The average user tweets .97 times per day
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738


Stats on Tweets

When we look at the content of tweets that are posted by users they see that users are frequently using Twitter to interact and communicate with other users rather than just answer the "What are you doing?" question.

• 1.44% of all tweets are retweets
• 37.95% of all tweets contain an "@" symbol (mentions)
• 33.44% of all tweets start with an "@" symbol (replies)

They also see that many users are reaching the 140-character limit in an attempt to get as much content as possible into every update.


Top 20 Geographical locations

Because the location field on Twitter profiles does not contain any structured data (Twitter does not require people to separate city from state or province, etc.) it is hard to do any detailed analysis on this data.

However, the list of the top thirty most common phrases people type into their location section on their bio shows that Twitter seems to be popular in major English-speaking cities.

The top 20 locations are as below:

London
Los Angeles
Chicago
New York
San Francisco
Toronto
Atlanta
Seattle
Boston
Austin
Sydney
San Diego
Washington, DC
Melbourne
Portland
Houston
Vancouver
Dallas
Brooklyn
Philadelphia

Sydney is no. 11 !!!

You can read the study in full here: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf