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Twitter Facts

Facts and opinions on Twitter and the Twitosphere

First State of the Twitosphere in Costa RicaOctober 29

A while ago a commenter on this blog asked if I could also analyze the twitosphere in his country, Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the east and south, the Pacific Ocean to the west and south and the Caribbean Sea to the east (source : Wikipedia). I have never been to Costa Rica, so I do not have personal memories or opinions on this country. Nevertheless, I found it a good idea to have a closer look at the usage of Twitter in Costa Rica.

The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica. Twitter user search is temporary disabled, so I cannot inform you on the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica according to Twitter itself. Twitdir reports 338 Twitter users for location Costa Rica.

Based on the location info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 507 Twitter users in Costa Rica, still active users. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number

BarackObama followersOctober 13

Twitter User BarackObama has an incredible amount of followers. This Twitter account follows every Twitter user that follows BarackObama. Currently Twitter User BarackObama is following over 100,000 other Twitter users. A rough estimation of the number of Twitter messages per day per users can be made of two sources. Twiturly scans between 200,000 and 250,000 Twitter messages per day, TwitDir reports 3.18 million Twitters users. This leads to the following calculations.

Number of Twitter Users (TwitDir) : 3,183,544
Daily Twitter messages (Twiturly) : 200,000 - 250,000
Number of Twitter messages per day and user : 0,063 - 0,079
BarackObama followers : 101.350
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per day : 6.367 - 7.959
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per hour : 265 - 332
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per minute : 4.4 - 5.5

It seems quite unlikely that Barack Obama himself would read all these Twitter messages. I even doubt it that a single person is capable of reading all these messages (5 per minute, 24 hours per day).

TwinfluenceOctober 13

Influence of a Twitter account does not solely depends on the number of people who are following the Twitter account. It also depends on the size of the network of the followers of Twitter account. Twinfluence applies the concept of social capital to propose a set of new influence measures for Twitter users (from the about page).

Reach: Reach is the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity: Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence. Of course, this number could jump significantly with the addition of a few high-profile followers.

Social Capital: Tthe average first-order network of a Twitterer's followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer's followers have a lot of followers themselves.

Centralization: This is a measure of how much a Twitterer's influence (reach) is invested in a small number of followers. Centralization scores range from 0% (completely decentralized) to a theoretical 100% (completely dependent on one

Twitter Top 100 lists comparedOctober 12

In a previous post (Top Twitter Users) I listed several sites where lists of top Twitter users can be found. I wanted to get an idea on the quality of these lists. Do they contain the same Twitter users ? Do they provide the same data ?

I considered four top lists of Twitter users ranked by the number of followers.
1. Twitdir Top 100 followed : number 1 on the list has 94937 followers, there are 6586 followers for number 100
2. Twittercounter The top 100 most popular Twitter users : number 1 on the list has 94600 followers, there are 7156 followers for number 100
3. Twitterholic Top 100 based on Followers : number 1 on the list has 94894 followers, there are 6562 followers for number 100
4. Twittown Top 150 followers (only first 100 considered) : number 1 on the list has 6941 followers, there are 986 followers for number 100

The four lists combined count 179 different Twitter users. It is clear that the top 100 list from Twittown is outdated. Twitter user @BarackObama has only 5441 followers according to Twittown, in reality this Twitter user has 94937 followers.

Top Twitter UsersOctober 10

For those who are interested in how to find top Twitter users, I have created a collection of links to top lists of Twitter users according to several criteria.

In the first place there are global rankings.

1. Twitterholic

Twitterholic.com offers Top 100 lists based on Followers, Friends and Updates.

2. Twitdir

Twitdir presents Top 100 followed, Top 100 updaters, Top 100 favouriters and Top 100 followers lists.

3. Twittercounter