Is Twitter As Popular As We Are Led to Believe?

oDo you know that only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December 2009? oFind out how many Twitter accounts do not have any followers, or even send out a single tweet! oLearn who the core Twitter users are Figures based on a recent report from RJMetrics, a company which develops online metric analysis software, have shown that Twitter may not be as popular as we are led to believe.
There are actually less than 15 million active Twitter users worldwide out of 75 million registered Twitters accounts.
In fact, research has shown that approximately only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December 2009.
But we have to also take into consideration the number of spam and machine bots that tweet up to 150 times per day to increase search engine optimisation.
A quick search shows that more than 32% of all active Twitter accounts are made up of these machine bots.
These bots mainly tweet about hotels offering good deals, news services, weather services, top news within Digg, games and many more.
If we choose to only concentrate on the percentage of total active accounts of real humans, the percentage of Twitter accounts that tweeted in December will be much lower.
Other data also shows that Twitter may not be as popular as we are led to believe.
After all, up to 25% of all Twitter accounts do not have followers, and as much as 40% of Twitter accounts have not even sent a single tweet.
In other words, 30 million Twitter accounts have never been updated.
Further analysis also shows 80% of all users have sent out less than ten tweets.
Not only that, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has been on a steady decline over the past few months.
These worrying figures show that many new users simply do not do anything with their Twitter accounts after signing up.
These figures will surely deter any internet marketing firms from investing on Twitter as part of its social media campaign.
Despite these unexpected figures however, online marketing firms must know that Twitter is still growing at an unprecedented rate.
In fact, if it maintains its steady pace of creating 6 million new accounts every month, the company should reach one hundred million accounts by early May.
Twitter has already made headlines with its current worth of one billion USD based on Twitter's current private market valuation.
This means each active account is worth at least $67.
Not bad for a company that was once unflatteringly compared to Second Life, a virtual world that quickly faded into obscurity several years ago.
Not only that, those who have turned into core Twitter users have became increasingly engaged with the social media platform.
A report from Sysomos last year has shown that the top 5% of the most committed Twitter users account for as much as 75% of all tweets.
Statistics show that these core users are mostly employed in the area of technology and the media.
They thus have the ability to instantly spread red hot news worldwide for as much as four hours before it hit the mainstream media.
Although Twitter may not be as popular as generally assumed, it is still widely regarded as an effective news feed platform that appeal to those who are generally more tech and information savvy.
Anyone considering huge internet marketing campaigns should still consider Twitter as part of its social media engagement plans.