The state of the Twittersphere, February 2011

The state of the Twittersphere
February 2011
Where are we now?

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Contents

•  Introduction
•  The big picture
•  How does Twitter compare to
Facebook?
•  Personalities and content
trends
•  Beyond Twitter.com
•  Appendix


Introduction

This is an overview of Twitter in February 2011 using statistics,
tools and freely available information.
The purpose in it’s writing was to get myself up to speed with
the latest data and to understand as near as possible how
Twitter is being used today, rather than last month or last year.
It was put together in preparation for a training course for
business users, so the emphasis of research leans towards
corporate and organisational usage, but I hope as a result also
covers other areas.

Kathryn Corrick, February 2011
www.kathryncorrick.co.uk
@kcorrick


The big picture


(circa) 200 million
Number of Twitter registered accounts
January 2011

Source:
http://kathryncorrick.co.uk/2011/02/03/twitter-now-claim-to-have-over-200-million-
accounts/

(circa) 110 million
Tweets per day
1 January 2011

Source:
http://blogs.forbes.com/oliverchiang/2011/01/19/twitter-hits-nearly-200m-users-110m-
tweets-per-day-focuses-on-global-expansion/

(circa) 14 million
Daily active Twitter accounts
And about 40 million active accounts monthly
January 2011

Source:
http://www.flowtown.com/blog/size-doesnt-matter-why-super-accounts-can-be-worthless

78 per cent
Of users access Twitter via Twitter.com

The total figure for apps accessing Twitter is over 100%
as many users access their account by more than one
application

September 2010

Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html


8.2 million
Number of Twitter accounts following Lady
Gaga, the most followed account on the
service
16 February 2011

Source: http://www.twitter.com/ladygaga


605
Number of tweets by Lady Gaga
16 February 2011

Source: http://www.twiter.com/ladygaga


22.5%
Of Twitter users accounted for
about 90% of all activity during
2010.
Sysomos – December 2010

Source: http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010/

Compete.com profile for twitter.com*

January 2011
27,985,892 –
unique visitors
183,876,953 –
visits
Rank – 30

*Does not include visits via Twitter clients and applications
Source: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/


Google Trends gives an indication of
where visits originate for twitter.com*

Most unique
visits to
Twitter.com
come from
Japan

*Does not include visits via Twitter clients and applications
Source: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=twitter.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Origin of Google searches for Twitter

Source: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=twitter&cmpt=q


Seven
No. of languages the platform is translated into:
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean
and Spanish
January 2011

Twitter Translation Centre launched 14 February 2011 to
crowdsource translations of the site into more languages, first
up – Indonesian, Russian and Turkish. To join go to:
http://translate.twttr.com/
Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/02/translating-twitter-into-more-languages.html

6,939
Tweets per second sent
When midnight struck, 1 January
2011 in Japan

Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/01/celebrating-new-year-with-new-tweet.html

4,064
Tweets per second sent at 10.07pm (EST)
during the US Superbowl
February 2011

Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/02/superbowl.html

69 per cent
Twitter users who provide a biography on their
Twitter profile
Sysomos - December 2010

Source: http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010/

From Jan – Aug 2010 new users
accounted for nearly 44% of the
total Twitter population

Source:
http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-
© Kathryn Corrick 2011 stats-2010/

Top Twitter cities

London top Twitter
city.

Rankings are by
TwitterGrader.com and
are total number of
twitter users based on
the ‘Location’ setting.

According to Sysomos
only 73% of users in
2010 had a location on
their profile
Source: http://twittergrader.com/top/cities

How does Twitter compare to Facebook?
(This data is now a bit old, but it’s still just about relevant)

A breakdown of 2010 social demographics

Brand engagement
According to this research, on Twitter 25% of users follow a brand (40% for
Facebook) but 67% of those users will purchase that specific brand (51% for
Facebook) Source: http://www.digitalsurgeons.com/facebook-vs-twitter-infographic/

Twitter, Facebook & YouTube
compared using Compete.com

Source: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+facebook.com+youtube.com/

Personalities and content trends
Entertainment is gaining ground
Watching television and tweeting more common
Sport finds a natural home
Politics still much discussed


Top ten most followed accounts
(16/02/2011)

Other than Barak Obama the top ten most followed accounts on
Twitter are from the world of entertainment - popstars and chat
show hosts from North America.
Source: http://twitaholic.com/


How does Lady Gaga use Twitter?

Mostly for broadcast, she’s not very
conversational, but has a high reach and
high potential level of amplification
Sources:
http://www.backtype.com/user/twitter/ladygaga
http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ladygaga

And what does her immediate network
look like?

Source:
http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/#user-ladygaga

And what of UK users?
(16/02/2011)

This is where things get a bit muddy. Twitter lists user locations by city and country. In
London Coldplay tops the list with 3.4 million followers but search for United Kingdom
and Sarah Brown (wife of Gordon Brown) comes top with 1.1 million followers, putting
her above Chris Moyles if she were located in London.
But note once again, entertainment pre-dominates, with a splash of Tech in the form of
Tweetdeck, which has a US as well as UK audience.

United Kingdom - http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/bylocation/United+Kingdom/
London - http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/bylocation/London/

And who is following the most people?

Here entertainment gets knocked off top spot, enter – politics and commerce.
In the lead, it’s Barack Obama following over 700,000 other Twitter users. With Whole
Foods, and a surprise of Yoko Ono in second and third, both following over 500,000
accounts. But look, the UK’s most famous black door features in fourth place.

Question is; with such numbers in play reading those streams will be nearer to a
firehose of information than anything else. Obama’s account is almost purely
broadcast, where as Wholefoods do reply and interact with fellow Twitter users,
Number10’s stream is a mix of it’s own messages and retweets of other
departments.
Source: http://twitaholic.com/top100/following/

A different story:
TwitterGrader’s UK Elite
TwitterGrader.com aims to
measure the power, reach and
authority of a twitter account* –
rather than simply numbers of
followers.
Their ranking of UK accounts
shows a tendency towards news
sites and a few unexpected
personalities such as speaker
Mark Clayson and Robin Hood
airport tweeter Graham Lineham.

*See appendix for details on the
TwitterGrader.com algorithm

Source: http://twittergrader.com/location/?Location=United+Kingdom

What was everyone talking about in
2010?

After using hashtags
(which apply to all
topics), globally
entertainment was
the top category trend
in 2010, followed by
sports, according to
What The Trend.

Source -
http://yearinreview.whatthetrend.com/images/charts/
WTT_2010_Top_Trend_Categories.png


And in 2009?

Hashtags were far
less used.

Business and tech
took up a greater
volume of
discussion (at 11%
as compared to 3%
in 2010)

WTT_2009_Top_Trend_Categories.png

Within entertainment which topics
were top?
As is already becoming
clear from who is
followed on Twitter,
music is big on Twitter
and one of the largest
entertainment topics,
followed by television and
films.

With the decline of
MySpace this perhaps
may become more
significant as time goes
on.

And, whilst Lady Gaga
may have the highest
following on Twitter,
Justin Bieber is talked
about more.
WTT_2010_Top_Entertainment_Topics.png

More specifically?

© Kathryn Corrick 2011 Source: http://yearinreview.twitter.com/trends/

Trending topics in London
Evening, 16 February 2011

•  #masterchef - tv
•  #verysexy - hashtag
•  Nou Camp - football
•  #barcelona - football
•  Valdes - football
•  Alex Song - football
•  Jack Wilshere - football
•  Abel Xavier - football
•  Piqué - football
•  Shakira - pop
Source: http://twitter.com/

… I think there was a match on.
(and is not sport also entertainment?)


What do these trending topics
perhaps indicate?
•  The increase in hashtag usage indicates a greater understanding in
how the platform can work for communal conversations
•  The live nature of watching sport lends itself to Twitter
•  A greater increase in the user base towards the mainstream, with a
lower percentage of discussions on topics of technology and
business*
•  Most of the trending entertainment topics are for mainstream
culture – be they popstars, tv programmes or films. Which leads us
to conclude that Twitter has become a more mainstream platform
over the last year
•  The entertainment topics also lean towards youth culture, which
may also indicate as much about how Twitter is being taken up and
used by younger demographics, as it does how large this user group
may be.
•  That Avatar trended in 2010 is no surprise given it’s box office sales,
yet that it was talked about less than Scott Pilgrim indicates that
tweet volume ≠ sales.

*Note: this doesn’t mean the platform is no longer suitable for these
discussions, merely that other topics have increased.

This leads us to ask: who contributed most
on Twitter to trending topics in 2010?

According to What The Trend the most active contributors to Twitter
are based in the US, UK, Brazil, Canada and Japan.

But note…
The smaller populated country of the Netherlands is at number eight,
and Indonesia (which has a population of nearly 230 million) is in at
nine.
China and India with the largest populations are not in the top ten.
Source: http://www.whatthetrend.com/leaderboard

Top brand accounts according to
TwitterGrader.com – February 2011
1.  BBCWorld
2.  FoxNews
3.  G1 (Globo)
4.  NYTimes
5.  BBC Breaking News
6.  Huffington Post
7.  Reuters
8.  Engadget
9.  ESPN
10.  Mashable

All news sites.
Source: http://twittergrader.com/top/brands

Global non-tech brand trends in 2010

Here we see the success of Uniqlo’s UK Twitter
marketing campaigns in 2010, Lavin’s male collection
for H&M, as the well as the wide-spread discussion of
the Cadbury/Kraft take-over.
Not perhaps what you’d immediately expect.

Source: http://www.whatthetrend.com/

Beyond Twitter.com in 2011
The success of Twitter has been it’s open
developer platform, API and the fairly
conceptually simple communication
platform that Twitter provides, enabling
may other services to sit on top.


How is Twitter accessed?
(September 2010)

The chart shows
the top ten
applications used
to access Twitter in
the 30 days prior to
2 September 2010.

Applications that
access Twitter total
over 100% as some
users use more
than one
application to
access their
account.

“And, it should be underscored that users of
programs like TweetDeck are some of the most
active and frequent users—which is why, along
with the nature of how these clients work, a
disproportionate amount of the traffic from Twitter
runs through such tools.”

- Twitter blog, September 2010



The number of registered OAuth
applications is now at almost 300,000
- September 2010

Note: This can include multiple instances
of the same software



Mobile access?

In September 2010 Twitter announced:

•  46 per cent of active users made mobile a
regular part of their Twitter experience
•  Total mobile users had jumped 62 per cent
since mid-April 2010
•  16 per cent of all new users to Twitter start on
mobile


The Twitter ecosystem of services and
applications

A diagramatic overview
of Twitter services and
applications by US
based Brian Solis and
Jess3.
(See next slide for
breakdown of rings
and types of service)

Interactive version:
http://oneforty.com/pages/
twitterverse


Brian Solis & Jess3 Twitterverse rings

•  Branding •  Communication
•  Geographics management
•  Interest graph •  Research & analysis
•  Stream management
•  Dashboard
•  Mobile applications
•  Event management
•  Trends
•  Live streaming •  Social CRM
•  Geo-location •  Influence and
•  Relationships resonance
•  Marketing & •  Twitter search
advertising •  Causation (charity
•  Rich media causes)
Note: the basic function of sharing and tweeting content from other
services, such as Tumblr, WordPress and Flickr, seems to have been
omitted from the diagram, but is often key to connecting communities
with content, and increasing reach.
Source: http://www.briansolis.com/2011/01/exploring-the-twitterverse/

This is just scraping the surface
Whilst these statistics give some indications of the
extent to which Twitter is being used in 2010 and early
2011, they are simply scraping the surface.

Not mentioned here are a long list of ways Twitter is
being used as a communication platform - from activism
to watching and participating in television programs –
but I hope it’s brought a few statistics together and
joined a few dots.


Appendix


Sources

http://blog.twitter.com/
http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/
http://trends.google.com
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=twitter&cmpt=q
http://yearinreview.twitter.com/trends/
http://twitaholic.com/
http://www.whatthetrend.com/
http://yearinreview.whatthetrend.com/
http://www.backtype.com/
http://www.tweetstats.com
http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/
http://twittergrader.com/
http://www.briansolis.com/2011/01/exploring-the-twitterverse/
http://www.digitalsurgeons.com/facebook-vs-twitter-infographic/


More Twitter analysis tools

http://yearinreview.twitter.com/

To analyse Twitter accounts
http://www.twitalyzer.com
http://www.klout.com
http://www.peerindex.net
http://tweetpsych.com/

Link Trends
http://www.tweetmeme.com
http://trendistic.com/

Tweets per minute by city in real-time
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/

Tweets by country
http://aworldoftweets.frogdesign.com/


TwitterGrader.com algorithm factors

1. Number of Followers: More followers leads to a higher Twitter Grade (all other things
being equal). Yes, I agree that it’s easy to game this number, but we are looking at
measuring reach and I did say all other things being equal.

2. Power of Followers: If you have people with a high Twitter Grade following you, it counts
more than those with a low Twitter Grade following you. It’s a bit recursive, and we don’t
get carried away with it, but it helps.

3. Updates: More updates generally leads to a higher grade — within reason. This does not
mean you should be tweeting like a manic squirrel cranked up on caffeine and sugar. It
won’t help either your Twitter Grade or your overall happiness in life.

4. Update Recency: Users that are more current (i.e. time elapsed since last tweet is low)
generally get higher grades.

5. Follower/Following Ratio: The higher the ratio, the better. However, the weight of this
particular factor decreases as the user accrues points for other factors (so, once a user
gets to a high level of followers or a high level of engagement, the Follower/Following ratio
counts less).

6. Engagement: The more a given user’s tweets are being retweeted, the more times the
user is being referenced or cited, the higher the twitter grade. Further, the value of the
engagement is higher based on who is being engaged. If a user with a very high Twitter
Grade retweets, it counts more than if a spammy account with a very low grade retweets.
http://graderblog.grader.com/twitter-grader-api/bid/19046/How-Does-Twitter-Grader-
Calculate-Twitter-Rankings

What is OAuth?

OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows
users to approve an application to act on their
behalf without sharing their password. More
information can be found at oauth.net or in the
excellent Beginner's Guide to OAuth from
Hueniverse.

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/oauth_faq


Picture credits

http://www.flickr.com/photos/
98389526@N00/2261679314/

98389526@N00/5451441412/

98389526@N00/4957438604


Questions?
www.kathryncorrick.co.uk
@kcorrick
Admin[at]kathryncorrick.co.uk


The state of the Twittersphere, February 2011

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