Summary

Our Social Media Monitoring platform mines through millions of conversations every day for our customers. Out of these millions of conversations, quite a few happen to come from Twitter. We realized that we could do a large-scale in-depth study of Twitter users to better understand what is the average profile of a person using Twitter and hence this mammoth study on 36 million Twitter user profiles. Our core competency lies in analytics and by using our own software, we were able to crunch numbers and generate insights which we believe hasn’t been conducted to such large scale till date.

With Twitter experiencing such explosive growth in last few years, our team decided to conduct a more comprehensive study by significantly increasing the sample size. This report focus on the Twitter users, and hence, every minute detail was analyzed and worked upon to generate statistics ranging from bio, tweets, account types, categories to even the background color preference of Twitter users! This report will surely be of great use to those looking for in-depth analytics on Twitter users.

On average, a million active users have tweeted at least a billion times over the last 3 years Tweet This →

25% of Twitter users have never tweeted Tweet This →

User Demographics

If you do find this report fascinating and decide to discuss this on twitter, please use our hashtag. We will be coming out with more reports in the future, so do remember to check this space out regularly.

Before we dive into the specifics, let’s look at the general demographic profiles of Twitter users.



Gender distribution on Twitter

Gender information is not readily available on a Twitter user profile. Our gender classifier determine gender based on looking at Twitter user names, profile pics and other parameters. We were able to determine gender for ~66% of the 36 million Twitter users analyzed in this study. As is obvious from the chart below, the gender divide on Twitter is a little inclined toward females, with number of female users outnumbering the male Twitter users by 6%.



Age distribution of Twitter users

Our algorithms determine age-group based on publicly disclosed information in the bio and tweets. Since a lot of teenagers are comfortable disclosing their age on social networks compared to their older peers – the data here is skewed towards the younger demographic. Here is a break up of twitter users according to the age-group. A whopping 74% fall between 15 to 25 years of age. Twitter has a young audience with only 6% falling in the 46+ age category.



Only 0.45% of Twitter users disclose their age Tweet This →

Global Heatmap of Twitter users

In terms of geographic distribution of Twitter user base, US takes the lead with the highest number of Twitter users, followed by United Kingdom.



5 out of 10 twitter users are from USA Tweet This →

Top 10 countries with the highest number of twitter users

Country % of Users United States 50.99 United Kingdom 17.09 Australia 4.09 Brazil 3.44 Canada 2.92 India 2.87 France 1.76 Indonesia 1.43 Iran 0.88 Ireland 0.85

Followers & Following

Follower stats for Twitter users

Majority of the twitter users have less than 50 followers and only a minuscule percentage have followers more than 100,000.



A twitter user on average has 208 followers Tweet This →

6 out of 100 twitter users have no followers Tweet This →

Number of Twitter users followed

The same is true for number of following as well. Majority of Twitter users are following less than 50 people. There seems to be a strong co-relation between the number of followers and following.



A twitter user on average follows 102 people Tweet This →

1 in 10 twitter users don’t follow anyone Tweet This →

Gender Preferences

How many have protected accounts?

11.84% of Twitter users have protected accounts on average. The females definitely want to stay in control of their profiles with 64% of them opting for protected accounts as compared to 36% for males.The user with the highest followers with a protected account is WIDIKIDIW. She is from Jakarta, Indonesia and has a follower base of 515,290.



The average number of followers for protected accounts on twitter is 47 Tweet This →

~12% of Twitter users have a protected account Tweet This →

Background Color Preference

Purple is the new Pink for females!

Eminence, or in simple term Purple is the most sought after by females. The calculations exclude the default twitter profile colors.



For female Twitter users, Purple triumphs over pink! Tweet This →

Males prefer darker themes

Darkish theme dominates the male profile, with steel grey winning the majority. The color most popular with female is the least with men.



Gender Inequality within Developing Countries



The gender distribution is fairly even within developed countries as compared to developing countries like India, Brazil etc., with the exception of France.



84.2% of twitter users have specified location in their twitter profiles Tweet This →

10.3% of twitter users have geo-location enabled Tweet This →

More Females belong to Younger Age Group



Female twitter users outnumber males till the age of 25. But after age 35, female users start dwindling relative to males.



Yes! Women tweet more



Not only are there 6% more female users on Twitter but they also happen to be more active as well. Females send out more tweets on average compared to their male counterparts.



26% of twitter users have favorited tweet(s) Tweet This →

Categorization of Twitter Users

Entertainment related keywords most used in Twitter Bio



The cloud below shows the most popular categories. Keywords specified in the bio that are closely associated are clubbed to form a category for example music, video, dance etc. will be clubbed to form entertainment category.



Most females reference family in their Twitter profiles



Here we have identified top ten categories in which most of the analyzed twitter profile fall. Female users talk more about family and fashion whereas the Twitter male users prefer technology, sports and entrepreneurship.



Family category tops between the age-group 26-55





Smartphone & App Preferences

Apple vs. Google on Twitter



Even though Android has more market share than iOS globally, almost two-third of Smartphone/Tablet users use Apple devices to access twitter. The Apple numbers does not include the Mac OS based devices.



Official vs Non-Official Twitter Apps



The market share for third-party apps don’t come as a surprise given the recently policy change in Twitter’s API where they mentioned that they would restrict most third-party apps to 100,000 users.



32% of users still tweet from their web browsers Tweet This →

Miscellaneous

LOVE is the most frequently used word in a twitter user bio



Here is a tag cloud of most frequently used words in a Twitter user’s bio after filtering for stop words



70% of twitter users don’t have their bio specified Tweet This →

Tweet-o-holics!

28,121,801,616 tweets sent by 27 million active users in this study Tweet This →

Top 10 users with most # of Tweets InternetRadio favstar50 Market_JP Aviongoo currentutc currentcet materialitems XboxSupport jtorrance CombatSI

A Twitter user on average has sent out 794 tweets over the last 3 years Tweet This →

More followers ~ More tweets

Influence analysis of Twitter users



Our influence scoring algorithm takes into account stats like percentile rank based on number of followers, following, retweet counts, category etc. while coming up with an influence score for each Twitter user.



More than 50% of twitter users have an influence score of <3 on a scale of 1 to 10 Tweet This →

Unconventional Verified Users

Screen Name Created at (MM/DD/YYYY) Followers Tweets till date SevenFootWave 3/4/2009 4 6 DaBackWudz 7/13/2009 20 8 HerbalArgentina 4/10/2009 24 1 TwitPolls 1/8/2008 32 0 JOHNKLEMMERSAX 4/8/2009 36 220 ShoreClub 2/19/2009 37 1 yahoomaps 4/3/2009 40 0 celebstyle 10/19/2008 42 1 mustangnews 6/4/2008 42 0

Our Take

Social media has seen explosive growth, and Twitter is no exception. There is much to learn about these millions of active users. With diligence and hard work, our team was able to put this data on the drawing board and come with statistics that we believe would be of great interest to marketers, researchers, businesses and even for that matter social media enthusiasts. We sincerely hope that you found this report insightful and invigorating. Watch out for our reports section as we will be coming out with more similar studies soon.



An organization that originated in 2008, Beevolve is committed to providing the best and most cost-effective social media monitoring and measurement platform for marketers. The inspiration behind the name ‘Beevolve’ comes from the symbiotic relationship that bees have with flowering plants and how they have evolved together over thousands of years. Similarly, at Beevolve, we strive to build intelligent software products that learn from human interactions and improves themselves.

One Software that Delivers All

A platform that offers customers with real-time monitoring and analytics on conversations as they happen across the web. With our own web-crawlers, we are able to reach out to any corner of the web and provide you with comprehensive monitoring on any topic. Our broad coverage, coupled with in-depth analytics allows you to answer the Who, Where, What, Why, When and How for topics you are monitoring, allowing you to understand your audience better and giving you the much needed competitive edge.

Beevolve’s social media measurement helps customers in measuring the return on investment on their social media marketing efforts. With just a few steps, you can easily link your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, schedule and launch your campaigns, and track sales and conversions resulting from these campaigns.