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

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 comedy
writer Graham Linehan.
*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)
http://yearinreview.whatthetrend.com/images/charts/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.
http://yearinreview.whatthetrend.com/images/charts/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?)

Or explore via Trendsmap
London, 17 February 2011
A day later the Barcelona match is still being discussed…
Source: http://trendsmap.com/?ll=51.5002_-0.126002&z=10

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 management

• Geographics • Research & analysis
• Interest graph • Stream management
• Dashboard • Mobile applications
• Event management • Trends
• Live streaming • Social CRM
• • Influence and resonance
Geo-location
• Twitter search
• Relationships
• Causation (charity causes)
• Marketing & advertising
• Rich media
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://trendsmap.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/
http://trendsmap.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@N00/22
61679314/
51441412/
57438604

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

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The state of the Twittersphere

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

This is an overview of Twitter in February 2011 using statistics, tools and

Kathryn Corrick, February 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

*Does not include visits via Twitter clients and applications

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Most unique visits

*Does not include visits via Twitter clients and applications

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Twitter Translation Centre launched 14 February 2011 to crowdsource

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

London top Twitter city.

According to Sysomos only

A breakdown of 2010 social demographics

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Mostly for broadcast, she’s not very

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

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

*See appendix for details on the TwitterGrader.com

After using hashtags

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Hashtags were far less

Business and tech took

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

With the decline of MySpace

And, whilst Lady Gaga may

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

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

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

A day later the Barcelona match is still being discussed…

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

All news sites.

Here we see the success of Uniqlo’s UK Twitter marketing

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

The chart shows the top

- Twitter blog, September 2010

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

Note: This can include multiple instances of the

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

In September 2010 Twitter announced:

•46 per cent of active users made mobile a regular part of

Interactive version: http

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

• Branding • Communication management

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

To analyse Twitter accounts

Tweets per minute by city in real-time

© Kathryn Corrick 2011

OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows users to

© Kathryn Corrick 2011