December 23rd, 2008
The HubSpot State of the Twittersphere Report
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Inspired by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports, internet marketing agency HubSpot has released a State of the Twittersphere report (PDF). The report is based on data from HubSpot’s Twitter Grader tool that indexes more than 700,000 Twitter accounts (about 10% of the total Twitter user base).
The report has some interesting data on follower/ following behavior.
There is strong correlation between the following and follower numbers. Twitter users follow 69 people and have 70 followers on an average.
However, there is a large difference in these statistics between the most and least popular Twitter users. The more popular users tend to have a higher followers/ following ratio than the less popular users. For instance, users with 50 or less followers follow 18 people and are followed by 16 people on an average, but users with more than 500 followers follow 1087 people and are followed by 1320 people on an average.
This skew is because of the semi-reciprocal nature of Twitter relationships. Most Twitter users believe that Twitter should have reciprocal relationships like Facebook and each follow should result in a reciprocal follow back. Many Twitter users, however, use Twitter as a mini feed reader to follow other interesting users and mostly disregard who is following them.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams has often said that while many think of Twitter as a social network, the one-way nature of relationship is an important distinction.
You can also check out HubSpot’s “Twitter for Marketing and PR” webinar and slideshow.
Update: After unsuccessfully trying to find one meaningful comment in several posts on the report (Search Engine Watch, Erick Schonfeld, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Andy Beal, Brian Solis), I finally found some intelligent insights from Stowe Boyd –
What annoys me about the State Of The Twittersphere… by Hubspot is that it doesn’t actually do any meaningful analysis on a bunch of simplistic raw data.
The real analysis of meaningful trends will have to wait, but here’s some cross tabs that would be interesting:
- What’s the distribution of perceived value? Does more use translate into higher perception of utility? My bet is yes.
- What’s the distribution of use? Do people with few connections use the service less? My bet is yes.
- Do people gain more followers based on hours online, and numbers of Tweets? I bet yes.
- Where is the magic dropout number? A lot of users abandon services like Twitter, but I bet that once you have a network of size N, the likelihood of dropping out decreased dramatically. What is N?
Update: Dan Zarella has done an interesting analysis of 84000 retweets (via Pistachio via TwiTips) and found that 61% of the retweets contain a link and the word please occurs almost 8-10 times more in retweets than in other tweets.
