Twitter Users – Most Have 10 Followers Or Less
By Anna Johnson on June 9th, 2009According to an analysis of 7 million Twitter accounts by web security firm PureWire, 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, with 51 percent having 1 to 9 followers and 29 percent of accounts having no followers.
TechCrunch poses the question of whether users with hardly any or no followers are actually using Twitter.
Have they merely signed up to follow and consume the information of others? Did they create a Twitter account on a whim and then forget about actually using their account? Or have some of these Twitter non-users created ‘holding pattern’ accounts they intend to use in the future?
Apart from identifying Twitter accounts with few or no followers, PureWire has also found that 68 percent of accounts follow fewer than 10 people, and 78 percent of accounts have fewer than 10 Tweets.
So how many people are really using Twitter? Well, based on PureWire’s idea that an ‘active’ Twitter user is someone with 10 or more followers, who follows 10 or more people and has 10 or more Tweets in their account, it’s some 20 to 30 percent of Twitter account holders. Not that exceeding 10 followers, followings or Tweets is particularly telling!
None of these findings should, however, come as a shock. The vast majority of forum users post very little, the vast majority of blog readers don’t comment, the vast majority of email newsletter readers don’t click on the links… and so it goes. But it does put the Twitter hype into greater perspective.
