Almost Half Of Twitter Users Prefer To Sit On The Sidelines


Twitter may be considered one of the fastest social media platforms to spread the buzz about any topic, but a new report suggests that a high number of Twitter users seldom use the service.

A report by Twopcharts, a firm that monitors Twitter usage, reveals that nearly half of the Twitter users have no say in the conversations on the social media site. At best these Twitter users are mere spectators of the debates that rage on trending; at worst, these accounts are just dormant, said the report. The report further states that 44% Twitter accounts have never sent a single tweet.

For Twitter, which is trying to show advertisers that it is a strong and influential medium through which they can reach out to consumers, the number of Twitter users who don’t even tweet should certainly be alarming. Twitter currently has about 241 million active users. The keyword here is “active,” and Twitter recognizes or defines an active user as someone who logs into the account at least once a month.

Twitter’s bigger competitor, Facebook, currently has more than 1 billion users. Twitter, on the other hand has been struggling with user engagement. Additionally, it strongly felt that that the current format of the Web site made it harder for mainstream consumers to follow topics or take part in the conversations. Hence, Twitter underwent a significant redesign of the profile page which now greatly resembles Facebook’s profile pages indicating Twitter is aping FB big time.

Similar to America’s top 1 percent controlling 90percent of the nation’s wealth, very few accounts were highly active. Less than 1% of the Twitter accounts had more than 5000 followers and could be considered as influential. About 81% of accounts had less than 50 followers, while majority of users (74%) followed less than 50 accounts at any given time, reported Wall Street Journal.

While music artist Katy Perry is the most-followed user on Twitter, with more than 52 million followers, the firm pegs the average number of followers per existing account at 77. The average number of tweets sent per existing account is 442 Tweets. The report further states 30 percent of accounts have sent between 1 and 10 tweets and only 13 percent of accounts have sent out about 100 tweets or more.

Despite the apparent lack of interest from the users, Twitter has been discovered by companies and brands as an ideal medium, not just to spread awareness, but also offer customer service. With the platform slowly entering eCommerce and Banks offering account updates, could Twitter’s traction climb?

[Image Credit | TweetBrander]

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