New technology: How Twitter Users Changed in 2010

Friday, December 17, 2010

How Twitter Users Changed in 2010

Twitter signed on more than 100 million new users in 2010. As they get acclimated to the information network, significant changes in usage are bound to take place. That’s exactly what social media monitoring company Sysomos found when comparing Twitter usage in 2010 to 2009.
What stands out the most is that more Twitter () users have much higher follower and following counts.
Twenty-one percent of Twitter users now follow more than 100 people — that’s up from 7% last year — and 16% now have more than 100 followers, according to Sysomos, which looked at over a billion tweets from 20 million users in 2010 and compared them against data gathered in 2009.
Twitter users in 2010 were much more likely to provide a bio (69%), detailed name (73%), location (82%) and website URL (44%) as part of their public profiles. All of those percentages are more than double what they were in 2009, which means the average Twitter user has become more comfortable with sharing personally identifiable information about themselves.
Sysomos also found that 80.6% of Twitter users have made fewer than 500 tweets, which likely points to the relative newbie status of the average Twitter user. Also noteworthy is that 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.
The report highlights other Twitter-related behaviors, including popular keywords in Twitter bios, and analyzes how the friend-to-follower ratio changes as follower and following counts increase. We’ve included a collection of charts from the Sysomos report below.