[video for web: August 12, 2009]
Transcript:
I took time last evening to read through a detailed Twitter usage study that Sysomos, an analytics and social media monitoring service company, was keen to compile for us recently. Sysomos published their Inside Twitter report on their web site and have also made it available as a PDF download from their web site here, if you're interested.
Some highlights some of you Twitter users might find interesting:
- Nearly 73% of total Twitter users signed up this year, with about 40% of these having joined in March and April. These came on the heels of (you might remember this) Ashton Krutcher's widely publicized race with CNN for Twitter followers, as well as the broadcasting of Oprah Winfrey's first tweet during her show on April 17. An interesting aside here is the recurrent theme about the 70% newbie rate for an 8-10 month run-rate; in Q4 last year, Hubspot published its State of the Twittersphere (Q4 2008) report which similarly tallied about 70% of total users, at that time, as having joined in that year.
- As for number of followers:
- 98% of us have fewer than 400. (About 94% have less than 100.)
- A little more than 1% have more than 500 followers, with about 0.68% having more than 1,000.
- It seems something approximating the proverbial 80-20 rule is in play:
- 10% of users account for 86% of activity, and
- the top 30% account for 97% of all activity.
- As for the times of the day when the most Twitter activity happens: between 11:00 - 3:00 (EST) / 8:00 - noon (PST).
- Folks pretty much follow the same number of people who follow them, to a point. After about 150 followers, or so, it starts to fall apart a bit as the graph below shows. (For example, those who follow 950 folks [x-axis] are followed by only 531 others.) Seems about right. I know that, for my part, I started actively looking for people to unfollow who didn't seem to contribute much to the conversation stream -- i.e., spammers and excessive sales-pitchers, for example.
- And, as Twitter users gain more followers, they tend to Tweet more often. I don't know what's worse, the fact that the workload seems to increase over time, or that I'm so darned predictable. For my part, I can confirm that I've been posting anywhere between 8 and 16 tweets daily since passing that 900-1000 mark. Go figure.
In light of these stats, and the ever-increasing growth, I get asked pretty regularly how I go about managing all those tweets that stream across my Twitter page. Do I read them all?
Well, YES! YES, I DO! (No I don't.)
But, I do segment my tweeps. Then, after having segmented them, I read most of one, while using automation to try and listen to the other segments.
In my next post, I'll share a bit about some of the tools I use to help me with that.
