Twitter study finds more lurkers than active users

June 10, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments |

Twitter bird says things have changedMarketing data provider HubSpot has published a State of the Twittersphere report based on data scraped from Twitter’s live site through its API.

With all the buzz over Twitter, and all the obsessed Twitterati who pack San Francisco tech-sector events, it might seem hard to believe that a large fraction of Twitter members are pretty passive users. They’ve signed up and showed up, but a surprising number don’t do much more than that:

• 80% failed to provide a homepage URL

• 76% of users have not entered a bio in their profile

• 69% have not specified a location

• 55% are not following anyone

• 55% have never tweeted

• 53% have no followers

Also in the report is a chart that shows the distribution of tweet lengths. It’s a sight gag. You can almost feel the mass of human writers squeezing up against the 140-character limit to cram in as much information as possible.

Tweet length chart

Otherwise, there’s nothing shocking. The only other stat that surprised me was that less than 2% of tweets are retweets (tweets a user copies from someone else to share with his or her own network of followers). My Twitter pals retweet each other much more than that. Hubspot’s data overall suggests that the spread of behaviors across Twitter varies much more than it seems to among those of us who spend a lot of time micro-blogging. 

Tweet length chart

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Great stats on Twitter.
  • nebben
    These are interesting numbers, but I put some of the recent Twitter stats we're seeing in perspective here, http://bit.ly/rDgmp.
  • I am happy to remain one of those who still don't see the light. It's text messaging to groups. Personal spam.
  • archit
    Plurk is much more fun than twitter, for me, twitter is just for gathering info, plurk is for exchanging idea.
  • I follow several Twitter lurkers... my friends aren't very talkative. Lamers!
  • From the millions of users the number of spammers should be subtracted.
    From the millions of tweets, the number of spam messages should be subtracted.

    Any one left over besides a handful of leaders posting Tweets?