The last 100 million Twitter accounts

According to the account counter on Twopcharts, Twitter will register account 600 million in about 10 days. This means that Twitter will have registered 100 million new accounts in just over 100 days. In a previous post it was already demonstrated that a registered account is not necessarily an active account, and it may be interesting to analyse the activity of these last 100 million accounts. According to our research we believe the following numbers are a fair and accurate representation of the profile of the last 100 million accounts.

• 18.5% of newly registered accounts have become inactive in a period of 3 months. These can be both deleted accounts and suspended accounts.
• 20.2% of the registered accounts are not following anyone and have not sent a single tweet, which makes it hard to imagine that these accounts are in any way active users of Twitter. 
• 2.3% of the last 100 million accounts are protected.
• Use of standard "egg" as profile image: 48.9% of registered accounts.
• Use of location field: 14.8% of registered accounts
• Use of account description field: 16.9% of registered accounts.
• Use of both location and description: 10.2% of registered accounts.

According to our definitions, an active Twitter user sends a tweet on average at least once per week, and has sent at least 1 tweet in the last 30 days. 15.1% of registered accounts meet this definition. In other words, we believe that for every 100 million new registered users there are 15 million new active accounts. When we apply a wider definition, including all accounts that send a tweet at least twice per month, and have sent a tweet in the last 60 days, the percentage of active new accounts increases to 21.3%. On a daily basis this means that Twitter is growing with about 150-200 thousand active users every day.

An estimate of active Twitter accounts per ultimo February 2012

On February 22nd, 2012 Twitter registered account 500 million. Some critics dismissed this milestone as meaningless, because in their view, all that counts are active accounts, and therefore the big question is how many of these 500 million accounts are actually active accounts. Before we make an effort to answer this question we need to make two important remarks.

First, nobody but Twitter is capable of answering this question, simply because of the fact that we do not have any information about accounts who do not send tweets, but who do log in to Twitter and only consume tweets. Actually if we extend the definition of a Twitter user to these passive users, Twitter themselves may not have the exact answer either, since the impact of Twitter is everywhere. Many websites are embedding tweets on their pages and tweets are constantly read and interpreted by all news media in the world, which incorporate them in the communication with their own audience.

Secondly, determining active accounts is also a matter of definition. Does one take into account users that have submitted a tweet in the last week, month or even longer period? One could also argue that just checking the last tweet sent is not enough to be classified as an active Twitter user, but that someone should send tweets on a regular basis to qualify as an active Twitter user. Obviously the definition of “regular” in this context is also open for debate.

If we start with very broad definitions of active Twitter users, we estimate that 50 million Twitter accounts submitted a tweet less than a week ago, 74 million did this in the last 30 days and 94 million Twitter accounts have submitted at least 1 tweet in 2012, so in the last 2 months.

Checking for the last submitted tweet does not seem to be a very satisfactory way of measuring active Twitter users since we estimate that there are 59 million accounts that have only submitted 1 tweet ever (and 192 million existing accounts that never sent a tweet). When we qualify accounts for inclusion in the Twopcharts we consider accounts active that send on average at least 1 tweet per week, and have submitted at least 1 tweet in the last 30 days. When we apply this definition to the sample we took from the total Twitter population, 51 million Twitter accounts can be considered active as of the end of February. Stretching the criteria to 1 tweet per two weeks and the last tweet not sent more than 60 days ago, the number would increase to 67 million active Twitter accounts.

In a later blog post we will give some detailed analysis of the 51 million active Twitter users, according to our definition.

Some more interesting facts from the data:

• 13.9% of all registered accounts are inactive. These can be both deleted accounts and accounts suspended by Twitter. This leaves a total of 439 million existing accounts.
• 18.8%, or 83 million existing accounts have never sent a tweet and are not following anyone, which make the likelihood that these are inactive accounts very high.
• Out of all of the existing accounts, 29 million, or 6.7% are protected accounts.
• 48.3%, or almost half of the existing accounts are still using the standard egg as their profile picture.
• 21.3% of the existing accounts have submitted a description of the account, 26.6% have submitted location data, and 16.4% have submitted both.

Twitter ‘s official page shows that there are more than 100 million active users and that there are over 250 million tweets sent per day. How does this reconcile with our numbers?

From the numbers above we can conclude that there are 356 million Twitter accounts that may be active in one way or another. This 356 million is made up of the total existing 439 million accounts minus the 83 million accounts that are not following anyone and have not sent a single tweet. It is possible that from the 305 million accounts that are not active according to our definitions, Twitter does consider a part as active, because they are passive readers of tweets, or simply because they use another definition than we do.

With respect to the amount of tweets sent we can try to make an estimate from our data, because we know that the active Twitter users send 4.3 tweets per day on average. If we multiply this with the estimated number of 51 million active Twitter users, we can calculate that at least 222 million tweets are sent per day, which is 11% lower than the latest number as communicated by Twitter.

How did we get these numbers?

We took 10 substantial samples of random Twitter id’s, did some queries on the data, and checked how homogenous the results were. After we were satisfied that the variations between the samples were small, we brought them together in one large sample and considered this sample as a representative sample of the total Twitter population.

De Nederlandstalige Twopcharts van februari 2012

Met de Twopcharts houden we op maandbasis voor een aantal taalgebieden bij hoe de accounts van de meest populaire twitteraars zich ontwikkelen. Eind februari waren in de Nederlandstalige Twopcharts 220,561 accounts opgenomen die voldoen aan de ruime voorwaarden die zijn gesteld om als actieve twitteraar aangemerkt te worden. Om in de Twopcharts opgenomen te worden gelden op dit moment de volgende criteria:

• Regelmatig Nederlandstalige tweets versturen
• Gemiddeld minimaal 1x per week een tweet versturen
• De laatste tweet niet langer dan 30 dagen geleden
• Een account heeft tenminste 100 volgers

Ook wordt nog een algorithme gehanteerd om accounts te elimineren waarop een sterke verdenking rust dat volgers verkregen zijn via hulpmiddelen. Voor volgers van het account @nl_twop_1000 is de minimum eis van 100 volgers verlaagd tot minimaal 1 volger. Het betreft op dit moment echter slechts 294 accounts die minder dan 100 volgers hebben en die zijn opgenomen in de Twopcharts

Als naar de totale populatie van 220,561 accounts wordt gekeken die op dit moment zijn opgenomen in de Twopcharts, zien we dat ongeveer de helft van alle accounts tussen de 100 en 200 volgers heeft, terwijl 7.4% meer dan 1,000 volgers heeft en 0.4% meer dan 10,000 volgers heeft. Op dit moment hebben wij 52 accounts geïdentificeerd die regelmatig Nederlandstalig tweeten en die meer dan 100,000 volgers hebben. Voor de accounts met minder dan 1,000 volgers volgt hieronder een nadere analyse:

Zoals hierboven is gesteld dient een account gemiddeld minimaal 1x per week een tweet te versturen om opgenomen te worden in de Twopcharts. Gemiddeld verstuurt de hele populatie echter maar liefst 15.8 tweets per dag. Door 1.2% wordt zelfs meer dan 100 tweets per dag verstuurd, maar hier zitten vele automatische tweetbots tussen van allerlei nieuwsmedia, maar ook een grote groep zeer enthousiaste jongeren die Twitter vrij recent ontdekt hebben.

Door 42% van de populatie wordt gemiddeld meer dan 10 tweets per dag verstuurd, terwijl 83.5% gemiddeld tenminste 1 tweet per dag verstuurt.

Hoeveel actieve Nederlandstalige twitteraars zijn er?

Doordat de Twopcharts zich beperken tot het actief volgen van accounts met meer dan 100 volgers, hebben we geen database van de totale actieve Nederlandstalige Twitter populatie. Er is echter wel een methode om dit te benaderen.

We hebben 100 keer op een willekeurig moment een search gedaan op Nederlandstalige tweets, en die vervolgens geëvalueerd volgens de criteria die aan het begin van deze blogpost vermeld zijn, zonder de restrictie van tenminste 100 volgers. Vervolgens hebben we gekeken of accounts al opgenomen waren in de Twopcharts. De resultaten van dit onderzoek geven een zeer consistent beeld, zoals de volgende grafiek laat zien:

Het blijkt dat in de Twopcharts ongeveer 44.1% van de actieve Nederlandstalige twitteraars niet zijn opgenomen. Dit betreft vrijwel uitsluitend accounts met minder dan 100 volgers. Volgens deze benadering zou het totaal aantal actieve Nederlandstalige twitteraars op dit moment derhalve iets minder dan 400,000 bedragen. Dit getal kunnen we echter nog ophogen met maximaal 5% voor gebruikers die hun tweets afschermen, waarmee het totaal op zo’n 420,000 komt. Met een gemiddelde van 15.8 tweets per dag zou dit betekenen dat door deze populatie ongeveer 6.5 miljoen tweets per dag verstuurd worden. Hier zitten echter ook een aantal tweets in andere talen bij. Een aantal van 5.5 miljoen Nederlandstalige tweets lijkt een realistischere schatting.

Tenslotte willen we nogmaals benadrukken dat het hier gaat om actief twitterende Nederlandstalige accounts, dus zowel Nederlanders, Vlamingen en een handvol Zuid-Afrikanen. Een account dat in Nederland gevestigd is, maar uitsluitend in het Engels tweet, is niet opgenomen. Ook zal een nieuw account dat 1 tweet verstuurd heeft niet zijn opgenomen.

Some statistics on new Twitter accounts

Some of you may have noticed that Twitter is approaching 500 million registered accounts. From the daily rate of new registrations Twopcharts is currently estimating that the moment when 500 million accounts are registered will be sometime in the second half of February.
The question that has already been raised many times is how many of these new Twitter accounts are actually active users. Although only Twitter can tell what the exact number is, and how often people log into the system, we can make an effort to estimate how active new accounts are.

We have gone back to October 28th, 2011 when @AdenMo registered account 400 million. So far this account has only sent 1 tweet just after registration, is following 1 account, and is followed by 3 accounts. After we checked this account, we also checked the following 99,999 account that registered, and came up with the following results:

Out of the 100,000 accounts we checked and that registered almost 3 months ago, 12% has disappeared. It is safe to assume that most of these accounts were deleted, while some will have been suspended or cancelled by Twitter. Some other facts:

•  From the 88,052 still existing accounts, 54,879 (62.3%) have not changed their profile image and are still showing us an egg, with a variety of 7 different background colors.
• 20.2% of active accounts have filled in the location field, and 17.3% have filled in the bio field.
• From the 88,052 accounts, 3,871 (4.4%) has chosen to hide their tweets from the public eye, and have protected their accounts.
• 19,721 existing accounts are not following anyone and are not followed by anyone.
• Total amount of tweets sent by this sample is 3.8 million, with an average per person of 43.8 tweets for the period, or just over 0.5 tweets per day per account.

The number of 3.8 million tweets can be analyzed to show the difference in active tweet behavior by these relatively new accounts. Total distribution is as follows:

The table shows that 53.8% of our sample size has never sent a tweet, while 5.2% has sent more than 100 tweets over the period from October 28^th, 2011. This group is also the most active; 61.2% has sent a tweet less than 2 days ago and 92.4% less than 30 days ago. Obviously with the less active account these figures are different. From the accounts that only sent 1 tweet, 83.6% was sent more than 2 month ago, with the majority sent on the registration date.

On the last summary line, it can be seen that 10.1% of these new accounts has sent a tweet in the last week and 17.1% in the last 30 days, and could be regarded as, more or less, active accounts.

With respect to following and followers the following results were measured, based on the still existing new accounts:

The table shows that from the active accounts 52.7% have no followers and 24.3% is not following anyone else.  A very significant majority of 96.8% of the accounts have 50 followers or less. 90.6% of the accounts are following 50 accounts or less.

Conclusion

Based on a sample of 100,000 accounts that were registered about 3 months ago, one has to be very cautious to draw any general conclusions. It is however likely that from the huge amount of new accounts that have been registered in the last year, the statistics will not differ greatly from what we found here. The vast majority of new accounts only has a limited amount of followers and following, and based on the amount of tweets sent, and the submission date of last tweets, probably only a maximum of 20%-25% convert to active new twitter users, with only about 10% accounts that actively send tweets.

Some Data on the Top Global Twitter Accounts

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last few years you will know about Twitter, the micro-blogging website which has grown at a tremendous pace since its beginning more than 5 years ago. We would like to share some data with you that has been compiled by Twopcharts, the website that tracks Twitter users in a number of languages and cities, and offers a number of tools relating to Twitter.

It also tracks the Top Global Twitter Accounts, and has been doing this for the last two and a half years. Twopcharts shows that there are now at least 618 Twitter accounts that have more than 1 million followers, and 38 Twitter accounts with more than 5 million followers. Leader of the pack is Lady Gaga who had almost 17 million followere at the time of writing.

The number of followers for the 1,000 most followed accounts is very impressive, with an average number of followers of 1.6 million per account for the group and still 633,000 followers for the number 1,000 global account at this moment. The following graph shows the average amount of followers per 10% group of the top 1,000 Global Twitter accounts:

What you can read in this graph is that for the 7th 10% group, or accounts ranked 601 to 700, the average number of followers per account is just below 1 million, with an amount of about 950 thousand followers.

The average number of new followers was more than 91 thousand per account in December 2011. Where some accounts reached more than 1 million new followers, even the group of accounts ranked between number 900 and 1,000 reached an average amount of new followers of more than 38 thousand followers. The following graph shows the complete overview:

Although the top-100 Global Twitter accounts clearly attract the most new followers, it is obvious from the chart that there is a large group of accounts that add new followers with more than 1,000 new followers per day.

The average number of 91 thousand new followers in the month of November for the total group of Top-1000 accounts compares to an amount of about 40 thousand new followers per account at the end of 2010 and 25 thousand at the end of 2009.

At this moment Twitter is still growing very fast, and is registering more than 800 thousand new accounts per day. Not all of these accounts will convert into active and engaging Twitter users, but it is clear that the success story of Twitter is far from over, and we can expect that follower numbers will keep increasing in the near future, which will keep expanding the reach of individual Twitter users.

Some data on Twitter followers

Twopcharts is a website that started two years ago to find interesting Twitter users in the Dutch language. Gradually this was expanded, and the website is now tracking Twitter users in 11 languages. In addition to these languages it is also tracking the most followed Twitter users around the globe, which is dominated by people who tweet mostly or occasionaly in the English language. With the vast amount of historical data that is available, interesting things can be done to analyse Twitter use in the different language groups. For the purpose of this blogpost an analysis was made of the number of followers that the most popular Twitter users have by language. For each language group the average amount of followers was caclulated for the Top-1000 accounts at the end of June 2010 and 2011. The results of these calculations are the following:

The numbers in the table clearly show how fast Twitter has grown in the last year. The 1,000 most followed acounts in the world now have an average amount of followers of 1.2 million. In the middle of March the Global top-1000 reached a combined total of 1 billion followers, which means an average of 1 million followers each.

The second largest language is Portuguese, with an average number of followers of almost 196 thousand. The popularity of the Portuguese language is almost entirely caused by the popularity of Twitter in Brazil.
The third language, with an average of almost 154 thousand followers, is Spanish. From the Spanish Twopcharts it can be observed that Spanish tweeting Twitter users come from a wide variety of locations like Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.
With an average of more than 84 thousand followers for the Top-1000 accounts, Twitter is also extremely popular in Indonesia.

Disclaimer: The table only shows languages tracked by Twopcharts. Other languages may or may not be more widely used than the ones represented here. For example the Arabic language is only tracked since March 2011. At the end of June the average number of followers for the Arabic Top-1000 accounts was about 11 thousand. Other languages, like Japanese, are also very popular, but are currently not tracked by Twopcharts.

A picture says more than a thousand words

For many people the amount of followers an account has is an important measure of its success. Most people who use Twitter prefer more followers to less followers, and greet their new followers with excitement. The fact that the amount of followers is perceived as important by many people is demonstrated by all the services that claim to be able to help an account to get more followers. Getting lots of followers is not very difficult, if that is what you are after, but the problem is that the quality of these followers is not very high. In many case the followers of these accounts do not understand the language of the tweets, or are not actually trying to read those tweets at all. Because of all the tricks that are being used, the amount of followers becomes a much less reliable measure of success. Luckily there is a way to determine the quality of followers in case an acccount publishes pictures.

The assumption is that many people who read tweets with a link to a picture will be interested to click on the link. So the more followers an account has that read their tweets, the more clicks they will have on the links to the pictures in their tweets. We have checked about 5,000 pictures published on Twitpic in June and counted the amount of views. Subsequently we compared these views with the amount of followers of the account holder. We found that the average reach of a picture was 6.3%, where reach is defined as the total amount of views of a picture divided by the amount of followers. 2/3 of all investigated pictures have a reach that is plus or minus 3.2% of the average, so fall within a range of 3.1 - 9.5%. Based on these numbers one is tempted to conclude that this range can be called reasonably normal, where a reach outside this range would be abnormal.

Before we try to reach conclusions, we did an additional check under the assumption that accounts with a lower amount of followers will have a more engaged group of followers. We therefore calculated the average reach for various groups with an increasing amount of followers. The outcome of these calculations is shown in the table below:

The shape of the graph is very interesting, and indicates that the average reach declines up to an amount of followers of 2,000 after which it increases gradually again. The group with a maximum amount of followers has the highest average reach with a percentage of 8.3%. The group with an amount of followers between 1,500 and 2,000 has the lowest average reach of 4.5%.

Based on these calculations it is of course very tricky to draw hard conclusions about the quality of followers. Pictures may of may not have been very interesting to followers, the amount of clicks will be different based on the time when a tweet was placed, and obviously pictures will not be only viewed by the followers of an account. The consistency of the calculations is however very appealing, and we will try to draw some conclusions, within a wide margin of error, based on our findings:

• The reach of 8.3% in the group of account with a maximum of 500 followers plus or minus about 3% gives the best indication of what can be normally expected.
• When accounts grow in followers, it is likely that the level of engagement will decrease and it can be assumed that the lower range of 1.5% - 7.5% reach for accounts up to 2,000 reflects this.
• In many cases it is "hard work" to reach 2,000 followers, and a low percentage is very likely partly caused by the use of "tricks" to reach those followers.
• The increasing average reach for larger accounts may have something to do with the fact that these acccount can be interesting to many followers, because the accounts have either very interesting and influential tweets, or just because of the simple fact that the account holder is well known.
• With larger accounts there is probably also a wider impact of retweets, although we did not investigate this. Because of more retweets the group of people who view the pictures of an account can be much wider than only the followers of an account.  
• A reach percentage lower than 3% will in most cases indicate that there is low engagement of the followers of that account. We noticed that in many cases where reach was very low, there was also a very high ratio of following/followers, sometimes even higher than 1. This is an important indication that there is low mutual engagement.
• A reach percentage higher than 9% is in many cases achieved because of retweets. So even in cases where engagement of own followers may be low, this is compensated by reaching followers of other accounts through retweets.

At Twopcharts we try to calculate the number of "true" followers of an account based on the views of their pictures. We are inclined to use a margin of about 3%-6% as the multiplier for views. If we see an account with 30,000 followers and an average number of views of pictures of only 150, we believe a more accurate number of engaged followers will be between 2,500 and 5,000 followers for that account.

With this little investigation we still have not answered the big question of how many people actually read a tweet. Based on the fact that pictures are very appealing to view, a multiplier of 2 may be a defendable assumption. This would mean that your tweets are probably read by a maximum of about 10%-15% of your followers....