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.

First State of the Italian Twitosphere

In a series of States of the Twitosphere for different European countries, this is the third edition, showing the State of the Italian Twitosphere. In the first edition, the Belgian Twitosphere was analysed. In the second edition, the Dutch Twitosphere was the topic of discussion.

The analysis of the Italian Twitosphere is based on 706 active Twitter accounts from Italy. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Italy if the location explicitely refers to Italy or if the Twitter user was located in Italy according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups (see this previous post).

The actual number of Italian Twitter users is probably a lot higher. I would not be surprised if the actual number is over 1000. Only a lit bit more than half of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post). Furthermore private Twitter accounts or public Twitter accounts with no or only a few friends are very difficult to locate.

History of the Italian Twitter accounts
This first graph shows the history of the Italian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Italian Twitter accounts.


The second graph compares the history of the Twitter accounts from Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. It becomes clear the Twitter hype started much earlier in Italy, already in January 2007. From mid February 2007 to March 2007, the increase of Twitter accounts slowed down, accelerating again from mid March 2007. The Twitter hype in the Netherlands and in Belgium acceralerated strongly only from mid March 2007.


Oldest Twitter accounts from Italy
twitter.com/aron - Aron - first message on 30/06/06
twitter.com/ziodave - David - first message on 1/11/06
twitter.com/ivanl - ivanl - first message on 8/11/06
twitter.com/Agaponeo - Agaponeo - first message on9/11/06
twitter.com/danja - Danny Ayers - first message on 11/11/06

It is strange that no Twitter accounts were found that were created between June 30, 2006 and November 1, 2006.

Public of Private
Only 25 Twitter acounts from Italy or 3,5% have chosen the keep their updates only available to their friends. According to the First State of the Belgian Twitosphere 22% of the Belgian Twitter accounts are private, according to the First State of the Dutch Twitosphere 9,5% of the Dutch Twitter accounts are private. This can indicate that Italian private Twitter account are perhaps partly missing from this analysis.

Number of friends
7% of the Italian Twitter accounts have no Twitter friends at all. An average Twitter account from Italy has 32 friends, which is a lot higher than the 9,6 friends for a Belgian Twitter account and 13,5 friends for a Dutch Twitter account (these averages were calculated several weeks ago).


Top 5
twitter.com/estudiante - silvano - 803 friends
twitter.com/desgrassia - desgrassia - 502 friends
twitter.com/miawallace1976 - Carla Bruni - 428 friends
twitter.com/BluBlog - Luca Moretto - 332 friends
twitter.com/cannola - pasquale - 332 friends

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as friend and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 4% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as a friend. An average Twitter account from Italy has 26 followers. For a Belgian Twitter account there were 10,5 followers, for a Dutch Twitter account there were 12,5 followers.


Top 5
twitter.com/pandemia - Luca Conti - 355 followers
twitter.com/fullo - Fullo - 297 followers
twitter.com/Giovy - Giovy - 258 followers
twitter.com/Chewbacca - Chewbacca - 237 followers
twitter.com/abeggi - Andrea Beggi - 232 followers

Updates
Only 2% of the accounts from Italy are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Italy has 106 updates, compared to 72 for a Belgian Twitter account and 88 for a Dutch Twitter account. Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day. The averages for Belgium and the Netherlands were calculated a few weeks ago.


Top 5
twitter.com/catepol - catepol - 2308 updates
twitter.com/lastmac - Last Mac News [IT] - 1293 updates
twitter.com/gecco - Carlo Minucci - 1291 updates
twitter.com/eio - eio - 1143 updates
twitter.com/elena - elena - 1090 updates

Degree of activity
33% of all Twitter accounts from Italy with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts. For the Netherlands this was 10% and for Belgium 12%. 57% of all Twitter accounts from Italy with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. For the Netherlands this was 73% and for Belgium 74%. These figures indicate that the number of inactive Twitter accounts in Italy is higher than in the other two countries. Perhaps the hype about Twitter is partly over in Italy.

Conclusion
This state of the Italian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (friends/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

The comparison of the Italian Twitosphere with the Dutch and Belgian Twitospheres reveals that the maturity of Italian Twitosphere is higher. Italian Twitterers have more friends and followers, they have written more messages. On the other hand the number of inactive Twitter accounts is also higher. The fact that 57% of the Italian Twitterers have at least one message in the last 7 days indicates that Twitter is still alive in Italy. Keep on twittering Italy.

I would like to thank Tony Siino for his assistance in identifing Italian Twitter accounts.