Twitter's Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila
Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.
Twitter's Most Active Users in Detail
Sysomos's Alex Cheng and Mark Evans decided to take a closer look at the top 5% of Twitter's most active users, and the results of their study are quite interesting. Most of them (60.6%) live in the United States, 6.9% in the U.K., 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada. 54% are male and 46% are female (on Twitter overall, 46% of all users are male and 53% female).
These active Twitter users also tend to have more followers. 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for Twitter overall.
Interestingly, a third of these highly active users only signed up for Twitter this year. About 72.5% of all of Twitter's users only signed up this year. These numbers seem to suggest that some of the most active and enthusiastic users had already signed up for the service before it became the mainstream phenomenon it is now.
Who Are The Most Active Users?
Sysomos also compiled a list of the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers. Fox News (@foxnews) leads this list with 136 tweets per day, followed by Japanese BMX and mountain bike rider @mooris with about 108 tweets per day, and Hawaii's Arleen Anderson (@Alohaarleen) with 101 daily tweets on average. Other notables in this list include Chris Brogan (43 tweets/day), Guy Kawasaki (39 tweets/day), Tyrese (37 tweets/day), and Tila Tequila (33 tweets/day).
Active News Organizations on Twitter
While Fox News is clearly the most active news organization on Twitter (though 136 tweets/day might be slightly overwhelming), the New York Times posts about 39 tweets per day and Time.com sends out about 30 tweets per day to its over 1.2 million followers. With just under 29 tweets per day, Breaking News didn't quite make the list.
More Info
Here are a few more interesting tidbits from the Sysomos report:
- Among the top 5% of active Twitter users, 48% have more than 100 followers; only 6.3% of all Twitter users have more than 100 followers.
- 3.3% of the most active users have more than 2000 followers compared to 0.29% among all Twitter users.
- 88% of the top 5% post at least one new message every day - only 36% of all Twitter users do so.
- Retweets account for 5% of the activity from the top Twitter users - it accounts for 4% of the activity of all Twitter users.
- Active users with more than 1000 followers tend to have "Internet marketer", "Internet marketing", "business marketing" and "entrepreneur" as keywords in their profiles.
- The leading keywords for those with less than 1000 followers are "Web designer", "graphic designer", "love", and "Web developer".
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So just Bots and Dogs, then...
Apparently I'm not tweeting enough to make this list ;-)
Bots, they are spreading and becoming active than ever.
Posted by: ashish damania
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August 5, 2009 2:08 PM
I got back at them. I unfollowed all of them. :-)
Posted by: Robert Scoble
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August 5, 2009 2:09 PM
are there bots on FF too?
Posted by: Justin Long
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August 5, 2009 2:13 PM
Should active really be defined by number of tweets per day? That is like defining the best person in a room as the one never stops talking.
So far not seen "bots" on Friendfeed. I hope never.
Posted by: ashish damania
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August 5, 2009 2:17 PM
"Bots"... I hate bots...
Posted by: Rob Rose
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August 5, 2009 2:20 PM
They used to be on the forums so much...looks like they all found their new toy.
Posted by: Rob Sellen :o)
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August 5, 2009 2:27 PM
good informative post! just sent it out via RT to my 5829 followers. ;-)
Cool!!! I defy categorization!! The Experiment continues!!!
Not surprised. Twitter is increasingly becoming a wasteland. The API has more holes than swiss cheese. I still think it's a fantastic social application, but you have to put effort into it to manage it well.
These statistics should find some way of excluding all the inactive accounts. I'm guessing thousands sign up, tweet a couple of times, and then forget they were ever there.
That top 6% or so of users, with over 100 followers and once a day posts, should be analyzed separately to the dead accounts. As it stands, these statistics mean almost nothing.
It was like when Second Life was claiming to have 10s of thousands of accounts. Great, but how many of those are being used? Details on THAT portion of the "population" are what's interesting.
I was curious about a user that was overwhelming my feed. I put his user name in TweetStats and this is what came back.
http://twitpic.com/cogoe
Tila is like the only interesting celeb on twitter and she RT's people!
#tilaArmy
Why doesn't this article mention Alyssa Milano?
She also tweets a lot too.. 17th in the list
and btw, how come there is no male celebrity in the most active list LOL
@clubdistrict I think that using twitter is the future, but Nightlife Simplified http://www.clubdistrict.com
peace and love
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Email Marketing
I know that my company, FiredUpNetwork, actively uses Twitter to reach out and engage with potential users. We have several twitters catering to each area of our site (which is a professional network and informational resource database for those looking to change careers or start a business) and have found it an interesting (and free) marketing tool, but have gotten mixed results from it.
www.firedupnetwork.com
Are there studies that show what % of tweets come from auto generated services like twitterfeed?
I used to tweet a lot. But of late, i find the activities on Twitter is too fast and too much for my involvement to be noticed.
5% of Twitter's users makeup 75% of all the activity. that's a very low number. so it seems that twitter isn't really as popular as it is advertised.
amazing how many of those active posters I actually recognise (and unfollowed). Would imagine www.dogsontwitter.com is a real hit then!
Interesting - shows where Twitter is headed. It'll soon be completely overrun by spammers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Mansfield
An interesting waste of my time, I could be twittering to the top!
I can't help but believe Twitter is a fad that will pass. Once people get bored it will go the way of so many of the other Social Media Groups.
The data is still older. If you see the current data, its mind boggling.
The people are twitting at the lesser pace compared to the bots are twitting.
If you ask me, daily I am getting around 5 request which are real bots and I have to block them manually. The developers are very smart in doing the coding especially when it comes to designing bots.
We just need to maintain our friend's list for more secure twitter.
To get more information, you can read my blog at http://hardikupadhyay.blogspot.com or you can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/hardikupadhyay
Who has the time to twit so much as the bots?
Always wondered why people have so much time to follow twits and to twit.