Yet more Interesting Twitter Statistics !

Most of you must already be active on social networking sites including Twitter-sphere. So, there is no need for me explaining the working and concept of this path breaking networking site involving jargons such as ‘Tweet’, ‘Retweet’ and ‘Followers’ to name a few.

This micro blogging site hasn’t even completed 3 years of its existence and the so called tweetmania has spread far and wide into the nerves of its more than 41 million users – right from a common man to even a big celebrity or a politician.

According to a study by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), relating to the topological characteristics of Twitter, the rate of information flow and users accessing any such information is way past most of the expectations built for social networking sites.

The study claims to have crawled through the entire Twitter universe while covering 4266 trending topics, 106 million tweet messages and a whooping 1.47 billion social relations.

In what could be touted as one of the deepest study into the working of Twitter site and its user related details, the findings are based on network analysis and study on distribution of followers and followings and their degree of reciprocity and separation.

The research further goes on to do quantitative analysis by ranking users by number of followers, Page rank and the number of retweets.

Here are some key Findings from Twitter study:

1) A very small number of users follow more than 1000, except official pages of politicians, companies and celebrities who need to offer some sort of customer service.

2) There are only 40 users with more than a million followers including celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears among others.

3) In gauging the correlation between the number of followers and that of written tweets, the findings showed that a majority of users who have fewer than 10 followers never tweeted or did just once.

4) 35% of all retweets occur within 10 minutes, with half of all retweets occurring in under an hour. This comes as a good measure to gauge the popularity of one’s tweet.

The content of these retweets are usually headline-oriented which further allows for snowball effects and far more spread over of the tweet.

5) The study says that Twitter is functioning more as a source of information spreading system rather than a social networking medium.

6) The study says that 67.6% of the users are not followed by any of the fellow users that they follow. This point towards the fact that Twitter is turning out to be a source to spread news.

7) A tweet that has no reply or a retweet is called a singleton. The study points out that of all the 4266 unique trending topics, singletons are most common, followed by replies and retweets.

8) Regarding the participation of users in trending topics, the study reveals that out of 41 million user accounts, 8262545 users participated in trending topics, while 15% of those users participated in more than 10 topics during four months.

9) Long-lasting topics with an increasing number of tweets do not always bring in new users into discussion, thus involving core members who keep on generating many tweets over a long period of time.

10) Only 126 (3.6%) out of 3479 unique trending topics from Twitter exist in 4597 unique hot keywords from Google. Most of them are real world events, celebrities and movies.

After reading these startling facts, if nothing else, I am at least going to ‘Retweet’ this article on my Twitter id as a source of spreading this informative article…..(Read Point 5 above) ;)