On June 10 HubSpot released its second State of the Twittersphere report. The report looks at information collected from over 4.5 million Twitter accounts over the last nine months. Their conclusion:
"…many of the accounts on Twitter aren’t actually using it all that much."
The report found that:
- 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL;
- 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile;
- 68.68% have not specified a location;
- 55.50% are not following anyone;
- 54.88% have never tweeted;
- 52.71% have no followers.
The report also combines three criteria (followers, friends and updates) to determine that 9% of Twitter users are inactive.
The lack of homepage URLs and locations doesn’t surprise me – many people don’t have blogs or something they’d consider a "homepage," and many more are concerned about their privacy. However, the fact that 55% of Twitter accounts have no bio, that 55% follow no-one and/or have never tweeted and that 53% have no followers is food for thought.
A few mitigating factors come to mind, which might explain some of these statistics:
- This report looked at 4.5m Twitter accounts compared to the 500,000 included in the last report. Twitter’s exponential growth means that a large proportion of accounts are likely new, and new users have less followers, friends and updates;
- Spammers and bots represent an increasingly large proportion of the Twittersphere;
- Savvy people and companies are claiming their Twitter IDs whether they’re ready to use them or not;
- According to Technorati‘s latest State of the Blogosphere, less than 6% of blogs have been active in the last four months. By that measure of activity, Twitter’s users are quite active.
Still, these statistics are a useful wake-up call. Twitter still isn’t a silver bullet solution to your problems. Neither is social media as a whole. They may be an important part of your toolkit, but they cannot operate in isolation.
Integrated communications approaches are, and will continue to be, the best approach.
