Peerreach Blog

25 Jul Are celebrities buying fake followers? Sites like ours and twitteraudit.com clearly display that many celebrities have huge amounts of fake followers. Are they buying those fake followers or is there an alternative reason? Indeed, some celebrities (and non celebrities) are buying fake followers. I did publish about this before on Twirus.com. A company offering fake followers has to create those fake accounts. They write a computer program that automatically signs up new accounts and follow the same steps that you and I follow when we create a Twitter account. This morning I created a new twitter account @nicotest1234, and nowhere did I have to fill out a Captcha code. So it’s easy to write such a program. When you create a new account, Twitter suggests accounts to follow. By default, ‘Popular accounts’ is checked. The following accounts are in this group Using the Audience Insight section of PeerReach (displayed on the bottom of a profile after signing in using Twitter credentials) I found out that all those accounts are quickly gaining followers since the summer of 2014, when Twitter changed the sign-up process. In the Audience Insights for @robwijnberg, @alexanderNL and @fritswester we see that all of them are gaining followers quickly since mid 2014, and that most of these accounts are spam (fake) accounts. Are @robwijnberg, @alexanderNL and @fritswester paying for those followers? Very unlikely, especially since I know two of them personally. However, some people are buying fake followers. The accounts created start following the accounts that Twitter is suggesting. Therefore also sincere Twitter users end up having many fake Twitter followers. No comments • Written by Nico Tweet

05 Feb More active twitter users after IPO, but they tweet less. We’ve updated some of the numbers from our big Twitter research from last November to give you some insight on Twitter’s first quarter as a public company. Twitter’s official number will be published later today. The first metric we’ve looked at was the number of Monthly and Daily active Twitter users. The number of accounts tweeting at least once a month (MAtU) has grown from 117 million in October 2013 to 122 million in January 2014. The number of accounts that tweet on a daily base has actually fallen from 45 million to 41 million over the same period. About 40% of Twitter users actually don’t tweet but only read tweets, that’s why number published by Twitter are higher than ours. Twitter is approaching the magic number of 1 billion registered accounts. In July they had 825M, in October 904M and now 923M. This looks like a strong flattening but it should be noted that Twitter is very actively removing spam accounts. Some months they remove more than others. Languages on Twitter We looked at the most important languages spoken on Twitter and found some interesting results. English is the main language on Twitter, but the number of MAtU that have English as their main language is going down from 62M to 61M. Spanish is growing from 16M to 18M and Japanese from 11M to 12M. Portuguese, which Twitter users are mainly from Brazil, has declined from 4.5M to 4M. Noteworthy is that Twitter usage is spiking in arab (mainly Saudi Arabia). Usage went up 25% to 5.6M. 6 Comments • Written by Manfred Tweet

07 Nov 4 ways how Twitter can keep growing The 7-year old microblogging platform Twitter will be listed today for an initial price of $26 and investors worldwide have to decide whether to invest or not. Almost 1 million new users register daily, but the number of active Twitter users is not growing as it used to. In this article we will explain why, and in which areas new growth can be realized. Twitter has caused a revolution in mass communication. Top politicians and famous artists don’t have to contact journalists to broadcast their message, they can just post a tweet. Also for the average person it’s much easier to spread important messages. When an airplane landed on the Hudson river, a photograph was spread worldwide within minutes. In the Arab spring revolution, Twitter and Facebook had an important role to amplify the voice of the people. Twitter also plays an important role as a conversation platform in congresses and for television programs. Twitter is the only big Social Media Platform that allows 3rd parties to use the Twitter Platform. This allows other companies to create services useful for tweeps and help the Twitter ecosystem. PeerReach is such a company in the Twitter ecosystem. It identifies influential accounts and relevant content, and therefore it constructed a database of 130 million active twitter accounts. Based on our database we can determine the way that Twitter is used. Twitter does not provide very detailed information about its usage. July 2013 October 2013 Sample error Registered accounts 825M 904M 9M Monthly active users* 218M 232M 0 Monthly active users USA* 53M Monthly active tweeting users 114M 117M 3M Daily active tweeting users 42M 45M 2M Timeline views 151000M 158000M New accounts 30M 28M 2M It’s important to note that we use Monthly Active tweeting Users, and Twitter uses Monthly Active Users as a metric. About 40% of the Monthly Active Users actually don’t tweet, but only login to the platform. Below we see how Twitter grew in time. In 2009 the rapid growth of Twitter started and it passed the milestone of 100 million registered users. In April 2009, Ashton Kutcher was the first to reach one million followers. Now there are more than 1600 of such accounts. Although Twitter generated revenues of USD 422M in the first three quarters, it’s still having a net loss of 133M. Here are our 4 suggestions how Twitter should continue to grow. 1. Generate revenues from non-US users Twitter had revenues of 121 million in the second quarter, of which 75% are generated in the USA. However, only a quarter from the Twitter population actually comes from the USA, and Twitter should generate more return on its user base in Japan, the United Kingdom or Brazil. 1000 timeline views in the US generate $2.58 in revenues, whereas 1000 international timeline views generate only $0.36 in advertising income.

The huge difference in Twitter usage per country is clear if we calculate the Twitter penetration per country. The penetration is defined as the number of monthly active tweeting users relative to the total amount of internet users in that country. The picture displays the 23 countries with more than 800.000 active tweeting users. Of these countries, there are 14 with more than 5% active Twitter users. The Top five countries are non English speaking countries, with Saudi Arabia even having over 32% active twitter users. Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are two countries known for the fact that most internet users don’t have a PC, but access the internet through mobile. 2. Identify growth countries and groups Our graph with Twitter penetration numbers clearly shows a number of green fields for Twitter. In big countries like Nigeria, Germany and India Twitter usage is still low. China is not listed because Twitter is banned from China and therefore the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo has no competition. According to the SEC filing, Twitter has considerable competion in some local markets, such as Kakao in South Korea and Line Japan. Using the PeerReach algorithm and turk, we determined the Gender distribution per country. Globally, 49% of Twitter users is male. 3. Target the young and users on mobile. Twitter users are young, on average 24 years. The average male is 26 years old, the average female 22 years old. Teenagers dominate Twitter. Only 20% of the tweeps are older than 30. In the graph below we find that the average is quite different from country to country. Asian countries have the lowest age on average. English speaking countries have older Twitter users. In most graphs we don’t show the statistical error, but here we displayed the error bounds on the average age (1 st.dev). The driving factor for the average age is the percentage of teens among the total active Twitter population. This is very different from country to country. In 5 Asian countries the teen percentage is above 60%. 4. Improve retention for new accounts Of the 45 million people that tweeted on October 25th (the day we did our count) the big majority were already on Twitter on July 25th. Twitter has a stable group of active users. However, low retention for new users is the weak spot for Twitter. Of the 90M accounts that registered in the last 3 months, only 3M turned into daily active tweeting users. For the accounts that registered in July, we counted the number of tweets until 25 October. 56% of these accounts haven’t placed a single tweet. Only 8% tweeted more than 50 times. For new users the Twitter experience is very overwhelming. Search results are chaotic, discovery is difficult, and the trends, invented by Twitter themselves, haven’t been improved since many years. If Twitter can improve retention of new users, it should be able to get past 500M world wide active users and the stock price will sky rocket. Sources:

Internet usage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users

http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/10/03/revealed-in-ipo-filing-twitter-still-losing-big-money-even-as-2012-revenue-tripled-to-317-million/ Twitter booming in Saudi Arabia:

http://blog.globalwebindex.net/twitter-usage-is-booming-in-saudi-arabia/

http://www.arabnews.com/news/452204 SEC filing:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513400028/d564001ds1a.htm 167 Comments • Written by Nico Tweet

17 Jul 1 Reason why Gonzalo Higuain’s Twitter Audience increased Since April, rumors about a possible transfer of Real Madrid’s Gonzalo Higuain have been spreading throughout the world of football. The popular Argentinian striker initially was linked to Juventus, but after the Italians aligned Carlos Tevez, Arsenal coach Arsène Wenger spoke openly about his interest in the player. Read more… No comments • Written by Manfred Tweet