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".
