Social Media: more twitter usage statistics

There are many figures bandied around for the levels of Twitter usage. Reliable statistics are often hard to come by.  However, Twittter has, for the purposes of its recent IPO, provided a number of figures in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Twitter’s own analysis is that it has 232 million monthly active users and that that there are, on average, 500 million tweets per day in the world.

The SEC filing tells us that 77% of monthly active users of Twitter are outside the US and that the number of daily active Twitter users is about 100 million.

The PeerReach blog, based on its own database of Twitter accounts, reports that of the 232 million monthly active users, only 117 million are “tweeting users” (the rest log in but don’t send tweets).  And there are about 45 million daily active users (less than half Twitter’s own figure).

PeerReach also has some interesting figures on “users per country”: 24.3% of users are in the USA, 9.6% in Japan, 6.5% in Indonesia and 5.6% in the UK.

The “Twitter penetration” figures – the number of monthly active users relative to the total amount of internet use in the country – are striking.  The highest penetration is Saudia Arabia with 33%, followed by Indonesia, 18% and Spain 14%.  The “penetrations” for the US and the UK are 11% and 12% respectively.

Some of the other unofficial statistics are not entirely clear.  These include the following:

• The average Twitter user is said to have 126 followers (All Twitter) or perhaps 208 (Beevolve)
• The average Twitter user follows 102 people, 10% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone (Beevolve)
• 40% of registered Twitter users have never sent a single tweet  (All Twitter).
• 6% of registered Twitter users have no followers ( (Beevolve)

As for the UK, a report by eMarketer that the use of Twitter by internet users in the United Kingdom has risen by 1.3 million to almost 10 million people over the past twelve months, representing a net gain of more than 15 percent.  However, using the PeerReach figures, we get the following for the UK:

• 12.99 million “monthly active users” (5.6% of 232million);
• 6.55 million “tweeting users” every month (5.6% of 117 million)
• 2.5 million “daily active users” (5.6% of 45 million).