Very Interesting Twitter Statistics

A great infographic of Twitter statistics was posted on my stream this morning and it’s worth commenting on.  It is linked at the end of this post, but here are the pieces I found to be noteworthy.

Twitter users are now posting their bios, at the end of 2009 31% had bios, at the end of 2010 69% had bios.  That is a huge jump and means that Twitter is becoming more of a social platform.  This is extremely important to their business.

Other very interesting stats to that effect, users with detailed names in their profiles went from 33% to 82% and users providing their location went from 44% to 73%.  Twitter is capturing more of the qualities that make Facebook so valuable, namely the ability to market to very distinct groups of individuals.  Based on this data I’m sure they will be looking to ask users for more personal information in the near future, and of course, mine their streams, followers, and following for the content they are consuming and producing.

The vast majority of users still don’t have many followers, 95.8% have less than 500.  This points obviously to the fact that Twitter has and will always be a place where the majority of people are consuming, not producing content.  Twitter is a media reading platform/protocol (they don’t know which one yet).  The problem is, as I have written here before, the majority of the population still sees Twitter as a place to tell people what you ate for breakfast.  Twitter has completely failed at marketing, primarily because it hasn’t done any.  In order to truly transform our society, the way Facebook did by socially connecting us all on the internet, Twitter needs to market itself as a media consumption tool, not necessarily a social tool.

Still, you have to wonder if the Twitter platform will ever become as big as Facebook given that the majority of people will never be heard.  Why?  Because the majority of people don’t have anything interesting to say to the world.  How many friends does a normal person have that are willing to listen to their content?  50? 100?  Facebook works well because it’s not necessarily about publishing content every day, it’s about having your name in the digital phone book.  Twitter is about sharing content though, and frankly, most people are just boring, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Those who are on the platform though are learning, quickly, how useful it is for consuming content.  Users following 100 or more people jumped from 7% in 2009, to 21% in 2010.  Still not great, which means Twitter has a lot of work to do in pointing users towards the right people to follow (a problem we are working on at StockTwits as well).

Further, a 2.2% of users are accounting for 58.3% of all messages.  As I said, there aren’t many people with interesting stuff to say, and that’s fine.

The follower/following ratio stats are interesting but expected.  Why?  Because they hover around 1:1.  Think about it this way, if you come across someone with 10,000 followers who is also following 10,000 people, what can you glean from that ratio?  Well for starters, anyone following 10,000 people is not consuming content on Twitter, so right off the bat you know that this person is not interested in that use of Twitter.  It doesn’t necessarily say they aren’t social though, they may or may not answer questions from those followers.  Seeing that ratio in something with over 1,000 followers also tells me that there is a decent chance the user is a bot or doing stupid things to attract followers.  Here’s the general rule, you can’t consume content on the platform following more than 500 users, after that any it’s all just a blur.  Personally I try to keep it down around 300-350, I’ve found that over that and I can’t really follow well.

Maybe this is because I follow a lot of content in the financial space where time is important and people are posting very frequently throughout the day.  Take those people out and it’s possible that I could follow 450-500, I’m not sure.

Bottom line, if you want people to take you seriously, don’t follow more than 300-400 people.  What that ratio tells me about Twitter as a whole, is that they are still dealing with a lot of crap useless content being created, bots and otherwise.  This is skewing a lot of the data, so just be aware.

Generally it looks like Twitter is on the right track, but still has a lot of work to do in introducing users to content and getting rid of all the crap on its platform.  The social aspect to Twitter will be extremely important going forward to hook users in to at least sticking around a little longer where they may figure out just how amazing a medium it is for consuming content.  If I could request to see one stat, it would be # of times a user logged in, by # of people they are following.  My guess is that at some point on that curve the user really sees the benefit and starts consuming, and comes back every day.

Twitter Statistics For 2010 (Sysomos)

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