The majority prefer third-party apps

Nov 18, 2009 19:11 GMT  ·  By

One of the main reasons for Twitter's success has been the openness towards third-party developers. While the core service has stayed mostly true to its minimalistic approach, users can get most of the features they need from all of the services and apps that cater to Twitter. In fact, these apps are so popular, that less than half of the Twitter users actually visit the site to keep up or send out a tweet according to new data from Sysomos.

“So, how do you use Twitter? That’s the question we wanted to answer with our latest report focused on the applications to use Twitter. We analyzed a sample of more than 500 million tweets collected over the past five months to determine the most popular applications to use Twitter,” the social media analytics firm wrote.

The study found that Twitter.com was, by far, the most popular way of posting a tweet, with 46 percent of the users preferring it. TweetDeck comes in a distant second place, with just 8.48 percent, followed by the popular iPhone apps Tweetie and Twitterific, with 2.83 percent and 1.63 percent, respectively. Seesmic, which has just launched a native Windows client, came in fifth, with 1.11 percent.

In Sysomos' last report, Twitter.com was employed by 45.7 percent of the users, so the website managed to keep its market share, but the TweetDeck use plummeted from 19.7 percent. In the meantime, the number of Twitter users has actually dropped in the US, but has continued to rise elsewhere.

Most Twitter users are happy employing just one app, 82 percent, while 14 percent employ two apps. Only 2.35 percent use thee apps at the same time. The choice of the client is also related to how engaged the users are, as the TweetDeck ones are the most active, with 1.24 tweets per day. Twitter.com users only tweet 0.67 times per day. While the stats themselves are interesting, the thing to take away from this is that, while the biggest chunk of Twitter users goes to the site to get updated, more than half of them, 54 percent, use third-party apps.

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The majority of Twitter users prefer third-party apps
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