4 Types of Twitter Users

Twitter users within the global Twitter community can be categorized according to different criteria. Based on the number of Twitter messages published and the number of followers I have identified 4 types of Twitter users.

Lurkers
A Lurker is a Twitter user who has published only a few messages and who has a limited number of followers (people reading his Twitter messages). Everyone starts as a Lurker.

Bots
A Bot is a Twitter account on which automatically generated messages are published. Such Twitter accounts can be set up to monitor website availability, to republish headlines of a news site or to indicate which songs have been recorded to name only a few examples of usage. These Twitter accounts have mostly only a limited number of followers and many many updates.

High Influentials
An High Influential is a Twitter user who publishes only a limited number of messages and at the same time has a whole herd of followers. High Influentials don't write much, but they are read by many people.

Twitter Stars
A Twitter Star publishes many messages who are read by many followers. These Twitter users tend also to have many friends.

Twitterholic is a service that monitors the Twitter Public Timeline to identify the most popular Twitter users. Twitterholic publishes a top 100 by number of friends, a top 100 by number of followers and a top 100 by number of updates (messages published). I have created a graph with all Twitter users in one of these 3 Twitterholic top 100 lists taking into account the number of updates and the number of followers. The graphs show clearly the relationship between number of messages published ("updates") and the number of readers ("followers").

The 4 types of Twitters users can be easily identified on the graph below.

Some examples of Twitter users/accounts

High Influentials
Dave Troy, developer of Twittervision, Twittermaps and recently also Flickrvision (201 messages, 6130 followers)
John Edwards, American Politician (35 messages, 2541 followers)
Michael Arrington, Techcrunch (167 messages, 1931 followers)
Jason Kottke, influential American blogger (74 messages, jkottke followers)

Twitter Stars
Robert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger (1892 messages, 3861 followers)
Biz Stone, Twitter Inc. (1489 messages, 1428 followers)
Evan Williams, Twitter Inc. (1472 messages, 2564 followers)
Mr Messina (1326 messages, 998 followers)

Bots
Kstop : recorded music (28315 messages, 6 followers)
celebritynews : news and gossip on famous celebs using Twitter (10109 messages, 6 followers)
StationRipper : recorded music (27943 messages, 11 followers)
Keston : website monitoring (10224 messages, 2 followers)

Lurkers
There are lots of them, perhaps you are one ...

The global Twitter community (the Twitosphere) consists of many subcommunities. A subcommunity is charaterized by something the Twitter users have in a common. Good examples are the communities by country. In previous posts on this blog I presented States of the Twitosphere for the Twitter communities in 4 different European countries : Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

In order for a Twitter (sub-) community to be successful, a critical mass of High Influentials and Twitter Stars needs to be present within the community. These High Influentials and Twitter Stars will inspire a lot of followers to use the Twitter platform to exchange messages. The graphs below show the Twitter users identified in Spain, Italy and Norway.

Spain - 1219 Twitter Users identified (for a population of 43,4 million)


Italy - 706 Twitter Users identified (for a population of 58,6 million)


Norway - 101 Twitter Users identified (for a population of 4,6 million)


As the three graphs above use the same scales on the axes, it is easy to compare the different communities. The Twitter communities in Spain and Italy seem to have a significant number of High Influentials and Twitter Stars. The Twitter community in Norway however consists mainly of Lurkers. There are no High Influentials and only one Twitter Star. Future will tell if within the Norwegian Twitter community a few Twitter users will become local High Influentials and Twitter Stars, so that the Norwegian Twitter community will flourish.

Twitter accounts and rights

I have the impression that Twitter account twitter.com/secgen is being used by Mr Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, or by one of his assistants.


You have to be careful, because several Twitter accounts have been detected as fakers (see the Fakers page on the Twitter Fan Wiki).

Someone who registers an internet domain can be traced by using whois to reveal his identity. It is currently not possible to trace the person who is using a Twitter account. The only thing you need to claim a Twitter account is an email address. Several Twitter accounts have already been created with company names, but there are currently no messages or just one message on these accounts e.g.
twitter.com/cocacola
twitter.com/dell
twitter.com/ibm
twitter.com/mcdonalds
twitter.com/microsoft
twitter.com/nike
twitter.com/pepsi
twitter.com/toyota



Luckely for those companies, the Twitter accounts are not yet abused for negative publicity for the products and offerings of the companies. (Disclaimer : I did not claim these Twitter accounts).

Currently it is not (yet) possible to transfer or trade Twitter names. Perhaps some cyber/Twitter squatters are hoping that this will be allowed in a short time.

The guys running Twitter Inc. should come forward with a set of rules to regulate the Twitter community, an addendum to the Terms of Service. Who has the right to a Twitter name, the person who claimed it first ? Or the company who registered the trademark ? Which country will have the priority, as trademarks in different countries for a given name are not always owned by the same company. Will Twitter Inc. make it possible to transfer Twitter accounts from one person/company to another ? As Twitter is at least at this moment commercially not very interesting for companies (e.g. there are no ads) there is no urgent need to solve these kind of questions. If Twitter becomes a huge success, people at Twitter Inc. will have to start thinking about these issues. Companies such as Coca Cola, Dell, IBM, McDonalds, Microsoft, Nike, Pepsi or Toyota care a lot about their image in the real and cyber worlds. Have these companies already discovered the bright new world of Twitter ? Future will tell.