Study: 79% of Twitter Accounts Are Not Actively Used
Lots of cool Twitter statistics coming out of Barracuda Networks new study (pdf).
Where do I start?
- 21% of Twitter users are actually using the service–meaning that have at least 10 followers, follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times.
- 74% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers! However, that number is improving with a 30% increase in the number of users with 10+ followers (since June 2009)
- 60% of Twitter users follow less than 10 people
- 34% of Twitter users have more followers than others they are following, showing an 70% increase from 20% in June 2009
- 73% of users have less than 10 tweets, as compared to 79% in June 2009.
- 49% of Twitter users joined between November 2008 and April 2009–the period when many celebrities jumped on the Twitter bandwagon
- Twitter’s growth spiked at 21% in April 2009
Lastly, who tweets the most? Those with around 1,000 followers do:
I’m guessing that’s the sweet spot of actually being able to engage and keep-up with your followers.
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New MSN Homepage Goes Live…Really!
Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage–it’s now officially live for all.
New features include:
- TrendWatch – Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter
- Hyper-local Tweets – Uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location, available on the new Local Edition
- My Cities – Personalize MSN Local Edition and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country
You should already see the new design at MSN.com or you can head here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx
Thoughts?
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Countdown: 203 Days Left Until Christmas Twitter Reaches 20 Billion Tweets
What will come first, Christmas or Twitter’s 20 billionth tweet?
Well, according to the GigaTweet counter, you can celebrate Twitter hitting the 20 billion mark, a few months before you can put up your Christmas tree.
Twitter has already passed the 10 billion tweet count and is rapidly chasing towards the big two-oh.
Of course, stuff like this only gets reported because a) it’s still novel, and b) it’s a light news day. 
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Toyota Turns to Twitter for ORM Issues
Toyota is now turning to Twitter to help stem the tide of negativity that has been heaped upon it during the “Recall Free For All” (that one’s mine). I guess someone at Toyota HQ has been studying up on this Twitter thing and decided that it was the way to go. Of course, just going headlong into a potentially hostile environment would be foolish so they have found a way to “manage” just what is being seen and heard in this attempt to make things better again with the top selling automaker in the world.
TechCrunch reports
The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.
Called Toyota Conversations the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota.
Risky business for sure unless, of course, you can somehow “manage” just what is shown in the tweets that are part of this effort.
You may notice after taking a look at all of the top stories that are being aggregated on the site, that most of the news is positive. That doesn’t seem to match the general tone of the media writing about Toyota, which has been quick to criticize the car company for its manufacturing mistakes. If you take a look at Twitter sentiment app Tweetfeel, the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Toyota lean more negative. Tweetmeme channels can be set up to pick up only certain news sources. It looks like Toyota picked the friendlier ones.
Well, when I took a look this morning at the Toyota Conversations Tweetmeme site they may have not caught everything.
Take note of the logo used in Toyota’s tweets as well. It makes the company look like some kind of evil empire. Using black as your primary color to help people warm up to you again is not very effective but hey, what do I know?
So will this effort by Toyota help the cause? Jeremiah Owyang is quoted in the LA Times blog about this very subject as saying
“In the social sphere, it’s often best to be proactive during a crisis, to let the market know you’re listening, and centralize the discussion around your brand, giving the brand more opportunity to guide the conversation,” Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang said. “Yet don’t be fooled, on the social sphere the illusion of power is quickly dispelled, as everyone can have a say.”
Is this the right time for Toyota to do this? Wouldn’t it have been more genuine if this was underway from the very start because now it appears to be a contrived effort to stop the flow of negative press rather than a sincere attempt to “make nice” with a buying public that may not ever trust this brand like it used to.
50 Million Tweets Per Day? We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat!
It appears Twitter is finally had enough of third-party analytics companies getting all of the publicity over tweet counts–so it’s spilling the official beans.
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.
I may have to admit to contributing maybe half that number on some days. 
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Twitter’s Traffic Up 9%, Thanks To Google
VentureBeat reports Twitter has increased their traffic by 9 percent from December to January. After deeper insight from ComScore and Hitwise, it appears that most, if not all, came from Google.
When Google added real-time results to their search interface in December, it had a major impact on people discovering Tweets in the search results. [...]
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Twitter Breaks Tweet Count? Or Another Attack?
I just noticed that my number of tweets just skyrocketed, according to Twitter.
Apparently, I tweeted 34,000 tweets overnight!
Here’s Google’s cache from last night:
And here’s what’s showing right now:
I’m not the only one to see this. My wife’s just jumped around 10,000 too.
Anyone else seeing this?
UPDATE: While this is annoying–I don’t want to appear as though I’m a tweeting windbag–it’s a known, low-priority bug, according to Twitter.
Study: Only 17% of Twitter Users Are Active; New User Accounts Down 20%
Here’s are some metrics that should concern those inside of Twitter:
- The number of new users per month is down 20% since its peak in July 2009.
- The average Twitter user has just 27 followers, down from a peak of 42
- 80% of Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times
- The percent of active Twitter users is down to just 17%
The data comes from RJMetrics, which analyzed 2 million tweets from about 50,000 users. You could argue that no data is accurate, unless it comes from Twitter itself, but isn’t it interesting that we never see any of these numbers come from Twitter? You’d think that if the real numbers were more encouraging, Twitter would issue a “State of the Twittersphere”–similar to Technorati’s state of the blogosphere report.
If these numbers are accurate, it shesd some light on why Twitter has chosen to find revenue from Google and Bing, before monetizing its user base. The user base is simply not active enough to generate any significant revenue!
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Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?
Looking for old tweets? You won’t find any that are more than a week or so old on Twitter. Put the blame on all the massive number of new tweets coming in. The engines, they canna hold captain! Or that is, the search index behind Twitter Search can’t hold it all.
To see this in action, [...]
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Want Your Tweets on Google? Get More (Better) Followers
Back in October, Google was second to the punch, falling behind Bing as they both announced real-time search deals to include Twitter results. (And it didn’t help that Bing was already testing live results and Google was months away from the integration.) But now Google’s real-time results are live—and they’re talking about how they’re ranking tweets.
If you thought Twitter and Google were popularity contests, turns out you’re right, according to an interview with Google Fellow Amit Singhal in Technology Review today. (Well, Singhal insists that this is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest.) One of the many ranking signals they use is the number and quality of your followers:
“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says.
However, other ranking factors come into effect, too—including hashtags (Google has apparently modeled hashtags and found them to be a negative indicator of tweet quality), and context (if you’re searching for “Obama health care,” tweets mentioning Obama and the war in Afghanistan won’t show up as relevant.)
Plans for the future include geolocation information, and further development of the “truly symbiotic” relationship between Google and Twitter (in the words of Dylan Casey, the Google product manager for real-time search).
Google also acknowledges that Twitter isn’t the be-all and end-all of real time on the Internet (finally!)—they use many different social sites and news sources for their real time results.
What do you think? Is this the best way to rank tweets in real time results?
