Twitter Stats

How many people REALLY use Twitter?

And what percentage of people account for most of the activity on Twitter?

These are questions I posed on Twitter today.

I asked \”Would you say that 1% of Twitter members do 99% of the tweets?\”

Some answers from my followers and some of my own research has uncovered some interesting data.

There is a great deal of controversy over just how many Twitter users there really are.

A TwitterFacts blog entry from March 2008 speculates that there were over one million users at that time.

Much of this data is extrapolated from Twitterholic.com, which ranks Twitter users based on the number of followers. It tracks sign-up data and an ID number assigned by Twitter.

First, there is the question of whether or not Twitter assigns IDs sequentially or arbitrarily.

Let\’s assume they are sequential.

I searched Twitterholic.com for a more recent member and found @MichDe.

According to page, @MichDe is the 16,920,080th person to sign up for Twitter.

Let\’s say this is accurate. We can then assume that there are over 17,000,000 Twitter accounts by now.

However, many members have MULTIPLE accounts. I have four that I monitor. Only one of them is highly active. The others are for dabbling and future projects.

So let\’s assume that there are no more than 15,000,000 individuals who have signed up for Twitter at some point. I\’m not trying to be highly scientific here, but I do want to make a point with these guestimates.

My question is really focused on participation on Twitter. Who is creating the majority of the content?

Paul Chaney writes an interesting piece explaining the following chart.

I looked at Twitterholic.com again and noticed that the top 1000 Twitterers have no more than 2500 followers.

The ranking in the top 1000 has very few \”ties.\” That is, from #900 to #1000, the number of followers decreases from 2639 to 2455. Would it be safe to say that the next 1000 top Twitterers have at least 1000 followers? Let\’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the top 5000 have over 1000 followers.

From there, it has to go down.

So, let\’s play with some numbers…

If there are 1,000,000 Twitter accounts, the top 5000 account for the most followers. That\’s 1/2 of a percent.

What if there are 15,000,000 Twitter accounts?

Then those with at least 1000 followers account for .03 percent.

I know. Highly unscientific.

Still, I would have to say that 1% of Twitter members create 99% of the content.

That\’s a lot of lurkers and low activity individuals.