Characteristics of the Top 5% Most Active Users on Twitter

I came across an interesting Twitter study, Inside Twitter, by Sysomos. The study looked at over 11.5 million Twitter accounts. Since this study found that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all Tweets, Sysomos went a step further and looked at the characteristics of the top 5% of active users on Twitter.

The biggest finding in the new study, An In-Depth Look at the 5% of Most Active Users, is that they found 32% of the top "users" were actually bots. They extrapolated this data and found that 24% of all accounts on Twitter were bots. Now Twitter bots are not all spam there are some useful Twitter bots (here is a short list of top Twitter bots).

Some other interest stats:

• Over 60% of top active users reside in the United States. Followed by UK (6.9%), Japan (4.7%), and Canada (4.3%)
• 33.7% of top active users joined Twitter this year
• 16.5% of top active users Tweet more than 10 times per day
• Retweets accounted for 5.06% of top user's activity versus 4.02% for overall users

Twitter Stats Pew / Internet

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new study, Twitter and Status Updating. The study provides some interesting facts about Twitter users.

Online adults that have said they have used Twitter before:

• 19% - 18 to 24 yrs old
• 20% - 25 to 34 yrs old
• 10% - 35 to 44 yrs old
• 5% - 45 to 54 yrs old
• 4% - 55 to 64 yrs old
• 2% - 65 and older

As the majority of users tend to be younger, they also tend to live in lower-income households.

• 17% earn less than $30,000
• 10% earn more than $75,000

The median age of Twitter users is 31 compared to Myspace (27), Facebook (26) and LinkedIn (40).