The Truth About Twitter’s Traffic

Results Summary

We analyzed data through the end of 2009. Where the data overlapped with our previous analysis (which ran through August 2009), the findings were highly consistent. However, the updated data revealed the following noteworthy trends:

• Twitter ended 2009 with just over 75 million user accounts.
• The monthly rate of new user accounts peaked in July 2009 and is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (or 2-3 per second). This is about 20% below July’s peak rate.
• A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.
• About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.
• Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.
• Despite these facts, Twitter users are becoming more engaged over time when we control for sample age.

Funnily enough my limited study of activity for both LinkedIn and Facebook is not dissimilar, although they don’t have anything like to bot and spam problem.

The central point is the same though – the social media bubble has burst, because most people have better things to do with their time.