80 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Less Than 10 Followers

We already know that 10 percent of Twitter users account for 90 percent of the tweets, and a report from research firm Purewire confirms it and gives a clearer view with even more numbers. According to the paper, based on Purewire's analysis of seven million Twitter accounts, 80 percent of them have fewer than 10 followers with 30 percent having no followers at all.

The report shows that many users join Twitter only to abandon their account shortly afterwards, with a full 40 percent of Twitter users not tweeting after the day they created their accounts and 30 percent of them having never tweeted at all. In fact only 21.9 percent have made more than 10 tweets since they started using the service. This would confirm earlier reports that only a small minority of users make up for the vast majority of tweets and that Twitter is in fact more of a broadcast service for an important few rather than a place of interacting with your friends.

This is also backed by the number of followers most people have on Twitter. Only 19.7 percent have more than 10 followers with half of the accounts having 1 to 9 followers and 29.4 percent having no followers at all. Furthermore, almost two thirds follow less than 10 Twitter users with 24.4 percent following no one.

“There is a lot of noise on the Web, especially on Twitter lately with the buzz around Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kutcher. That makes it hard to wade through everything and understand who you’re interacting with online,” said Dr. Steve Webb, research scientist at Purewire, Inc. “Purewire is all about deciphering Web activity so that users know what and who they can trust, and TweetGrade is the first service that takes a comprehensive look at a Twitter account’s true legitimacy. Through our experience with PurewireTrust.org and our patent-pending Purewire Trust technology, we are able to offer Twitter users the transparency needed to identify and sort out the associated security threats.”