Measuring Twitter's scope

Marketing software firm HubSpot released its first-ever report on the progress of Twitter for 4Q08.

Twitter is a social media site that lets users publish short messages to "followers" (subscribers) in real-time. Companies using it to track buzz about their brand, or address customer service issues, include Starbucks, Amazon, Zappos and GoDaddy.

HubSpot's "State of the Twittersphere" (pdf) gleans data from an app called Twitter Grader, which availed access to some several hundred Twitter profiles, including user and traffic growth, "tweet" statistics, statistics on followers and the followed, and geographic data.

70% of users were introduced to Twitter this year, HubSpot claims, and adoption doesn't appear to be slowing: 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts open daily. A full 20% of Twitter users supposedly only joined in the past 60 days.

35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers, and almost one-tenth (9%) don't follow anyone at all.

What's more, a strong correlation exists between the number of followers a person has and the number of people a person follows. The average number of followers and those people are following is about 70, but the figure is skewed by what Twitter Grader calls Elite Twitterers — some of which have hundreds or thousands of followers.

By and large, the findings suggest most Twitter users use the service to keep in touch with a small circle of friends and peers: three-quarters of users have 50 or fewer followers, and for them the average number of followers is about 15.6, with an average number of people followed at 18.4.

Peak days of Twitter use are Wednesday and Thursday. There is 50% more tweet activity on a weekday than on the weekend, suggesting most users tweet from a workplace.

But the principal mode of accessing Twitter is via mobile, which precipitates growth: the proportion of US mobile subscribers that accessed social networks from their handheld units tripled to nearly 10% over a year ago, according to The Kelsey Group and ConStat.

By 2012, over 800 million users worldwide are expected to visit social networks from a mobile device, up from 82 million in 2007, eMarketer projects.

Earlier this month BrightKit launched a tool that enables marketers to better track and manage various Twitter outreach campaigns. Social network giant Facebook attempted to buy Twitter this year for a cool $500 million in stock. The microblogging service gracefully declined.

This year, Twitter contemplated charging businesses for use of its service.