RMM

I imagine that many of you will have seen Sysomos’ recent in-depth Twitter audit (twaudit?). Interesting stats, i’m sure you’ll agree. Just reposting them would be dull and tiresome, so instead i’ve decided to see how these stats map on to Forrester’s social technographies, something we’re fond of here at Ryan*MacMillan.

So what does Sysomos’ work tell us about spectators? Well, apparently 21% of Twitter users never post a message - so 21% of Twitter users are spectators.

72.5% of all users joined in the first 5 months of 2009 - so what we know about the majority (almost three quarters of ‘joiners’) did so at a tipping point we can reasonably assume has come about in the first half of 2009 - that is to say Twitter became ‘mainstream’ in H1 2009.

The news that 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers and 92.4% follow less than 100 people gives us an insight in to collectors habits of users. The majority of collectors, we can assert, follow less than 100 people.

Apparently more than 50% of users don’t Tweet from the Twitter website but by using 3rd party programs (of which the most popular is TweetDeck). This strikes me as critic behaviour as such programs enable users to more effectively/efficiently monitor and respond to conversations/trends. Thusly, 50% of users are critics. (Yes, this is probably my flakiest assertion and could be argued is joiner or even spectator behaviour - i’m working on the assumption that people use these tools as a way to monitor conversations more effectively as a means to respond, they could of course not, and this assumption my be wrong… or at least misguided.)

If 85.3% of users Tweet no more than once a day i’m inclined to suggest that the remaining 14.7% are creators - i.e. regularly create messages.

There you have it - my breakdown of Twitter statistics in to social technographies. To recap:

• Creators: 14.7%
• Critics: 50%
• Collectors: on average collect less than 100 people’e feeds (and are i turn only collected by less than 100 users)
• Joiners: 72.5% of joiners became part of the community during H1 2009
• Spectators: 21%