More Twitter

I know I seem as if I’m spending an inordinate amount of time discussing Twitter in this space but I think that given the many changes it’s bringing (I’ll discuss in a sec), its worth the electrons.  After all, Twitter as a platform has changed the way that many people and businesses communicate.  It’s also become, frankly, my early warning system of news.  Michael Jackson and the plane in the Hudson are just two of the stories I picked up on Twitter well before cable news or other outlets were on top of them.

So here are the findings of Sysomos about the Twitter-verse with my take.  After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, they discovered that:

* 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009 (OK, it’s new.  But that just reminds me that a lot of folks are in the discovery phase of the relationship.  It took me a little while to figure out how to use the platform effectively).

* 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day (in the words of Chance Gardner, “I like to watch”.  Some folks Don’t call in to talk radio either but they do pay a lot of attention.)

* 21% of users have never posted a Tweet (Probably a chunk of these accounts are placeholders – I’m holding another name myself which I don’t use but don’t want others to use as me either)

* 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people (I’ll be interested to see if these numbers go up.  Until resources such as Twello came along it was hard to find people on the service – their “find people” function is spotty, in my experience).

* 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity (we discussed this already)

* New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009 (we had sushi, hybrid cabs, and a subway first too.)

* More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share. (If you’re only using the Twitter interface, you are really not getting the experience.  But since most of the metrics about Twitter only measure what’s going on directly on the service, the statistics, above, means a LOT of activity isn’t measured.)

* There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%) (Who is more chatty?  Who communicates better?  I’ll wait…)

* Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people. (This comes as a shock to you?  Unless you only want to sell 15 items a year, you’d better be in a conversation with as many folks as possible.)

What has your Twitter experience been like?  If you’ll @ritman me, I’ll follow you back!