Markets

Twitter Users Mostly Just Like the Rest of Us

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: January 2, 2009 / 12:00 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Unless you spent the week before Christmas reading TechCrunch, you probably missed the first-ever "State of the Twittersphere" report by HubSpot, an Internet marketing company, that, among other things, seems to know a bit about generating reports that serve up a lot of buzz. (The report only tracks the Twittersphere in the fourth quarter of 2008, but, given the social media service's meteoric growth, a full-year look at what's been going on there might distort some trends.)

You can download the full PDF, but here are some facts about the Twittersphere that leaped out at me:

20 percent of Twitter users have only been on the service for 60 days.
People tweet more on Wednesdays and Thursdays (is that a sign of mid-week boredom?).
Though power users get most of the buzz, 87 percent of Twitter users have 100 followers or less.
88 percent are following 100 people or less.

In short, as with so many media properties (and Twitter certainly qualifies), there's the so-called elite, and there's everyone else. While Twitter users like Scobleizer have racked up more than 45,000 followers (and follow more than 20,000), most people use Twitter to keep in touch with a limited number of friends.

If you're wondering how HubSpot came to its conclusions, much of the data is culled from Twitter Grader, a service created by HubSpot which measures the power of individual profiles based on factors such as how many people follow them, how powerful their network of followers is, and so forth. (I scored a pleasingly high 97.1 out of 100. Follow me, if you dare.)