September 1 , 2009

Do you know who's on Twitter these days?
53% of Twitter users are women, study

Twitter has experienced explosive growth in 2009. According to “An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World,” from Sysomos, 72.5 per cent of all Twitter users joined the service in the first five months of this year. Who are they?

More than one-half of all Twitter users (53 per cent) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66 per cent are under 25, and another 15 per cent are ages 25 to 29.

Most Twitter users are quiet: 85.37 per cent tweet less than once per day. Only about 1.1 per cent of users update their timeline an average of more than 10 times daily. This means a small group of users dominate the Twitter timeline—75 per cent of all Twitter activity comes from just 5 per cent of users.

Not surprisingly, the more followers a user has, the more that person tweets. Sysomos reported that the average number of daily updates rises from three to six among users with more than 1,000 followers. But relatively few users are that popular. In fact, almost 94 per cent of Twitter users have fewer than 100 followers. Just 0.68 per cent reach the thousand-follower mark.

The situation is very similar in the other direction. The vast majority of users (92.4 per cent) follow fewer than 100 other microbloggers. Less than 1 per cent subscribe to the feeds of at least 1,000 others. Among users who identified themselves as marketers, the numbers were significantly higher: 15 per cent follow more than 2,000 people.

Marketers are also more likely to update than the average Twitter user. More than 65 per cent post less than once daily—significantly better than the 85.4 per cent overall figure. Another 6.3 per cent of social media marketers post twice per day (compared with 2.8 per cent overall), and 4.3 per cent post at least nine updates per day (versus 1.31 per cent overall).