Following on from last weeks popular piece highlighting the numbers behind Facebook's rise to prominence/dominance, I returned in earnest to my desk to look at its neighbours/competitors 'numbers'; in this instance, Twitter! Expect to find a number of interesting usage reports and statistics (though considerably more humble than Facebook's!) and please, once again enjoy and comment with any reactions and thoughts.
- Twitter was launched 15th July, 2006
- 175 employees
- Jack Dorsey, Chairman of the service envisioned it as an SMS-based social network, hence the 140 character limit.
- "just setting up my twttr." The first ever tweet.
- Twitter.com is the 7th most visited site in the US.
- An estimated 53 million tweets are sent a day.
- In February 2009, Twitter had a growth of over 1300%.
- Over 190 million active monthly users.
- Approximately 61% of tweets are in English.
- 0.5% of tweets appear to come geo-tagged.
- 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people.
- Almost ¼ (24%) of Twitter users have 0 followers.
- 640 tweets per second.
- U.S., Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK (respectively) are the biggest Twitter users.
- 60% of Twitter use is via a mobile browser.
- The Twitter search engine gets 600 million queries a day.
- There are approximately 70,000 applications currently using the Twitter API.
- Upon the death of Michael Jackson (as did a lot of websites), Twitter crashed with peak time message volumes seeing 5,000 messages a minute being dedicated to the artist. This was 15% of ALL Twitter traffic.
- During the Iranian elections, 5% of twitter traffic was election related.
- Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets.
- 10-11pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for between 4-8% of the tweets in an average day.
- 41% of Twitter users have not tweeted since they created their account.
- 20% of Twitter users have tweeted 10 times or more.
- The highest level of spam was almost 11% in August 2009. It currently stands at about 4%.
- 55% of the Twitter population are female.
- The majority of tweeters earn over $100k (30% in total).
- Lady GaGa is the most popular person on Twitter with more than 6,443,000 followers.
- 50 Cent's Dog (@OprahTheDog) has a rather large follower base with over 7,000 followers!
Resources Used:
Mashable, PEW, Nielsen, IWS.com, AdMob, Guardian, Wikipedia, The Drum, New York Times, Alexa, Wiki, Tech Crunch,
