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 Spanish Twitosphere

According to analysis presented at Ebiquity Blog Madrid is the 10th city in the list of cities according to Twitter usage. This is confirmed by Twittermaps, showing a high number of Twitter users in Madrid.


According to Alexa 7,8% of the worldwide traffic to Twitter.com comes from Spain. Again according to Alexa, Twitter.com is the 103rd most popular site in Spain.

These facts convinced me to analyse the state of the Twitosphere in Spain, as I previously did for Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 1219 Twitter accounts from Spain. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Spain if the location explicitely refers to Spain or if the Twitter user was located in Spain according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Spanish Twitter users is probably higher as only a litle bit more than half of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post). With less inhabitants than Italy, there are more Twitter accounts in Spain. For a population of 44,7 million people, Spain has 1219 Twitter accounts, whereas Italy has a population of 58,9 million people and 706 Twitter accounts.

History of the Spanish Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Spanish Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Spanish Twitter accounts. From the end of January 2007 there was an accelaration in the creation of new Twitter accounts in Spain. This growth was further accelerated around end March 2007. The graph indicates that the rate at which new Twitter accounts are created is slowing down from the end of April 2007.


Oldest Twitter accounts from Spain
http://twitter.com/ignazio - ignazio - first message on 18/07/2006
http://twitter.com/raulandres - Raúl Andrés - first message on 11/08/2006
http://twitter.com/shmuel - Shmuel Bowles - first message on 8/09/2006
http://twitter.com/eloyola - Eduardo Loyola - first message on 11/09/2006
http://twitter.com/Cyberfrancis - Francisco - first message on 26/09/2006

Public of Private
103 Twitter acounts from Spain or 8,3% have chosen the keep their updates only available to their friends. This percentage has to be compared with 22% for Belgium, 9,5% for the Netherlands and 3,5% for Italy.

Number of friends
8% of the Spanish Twitter accounts have no Twitter friends at all. An average Twitter account from Spain has 15,8 friends, which is higher than the 9,6 friends for a Belgian Twitter account and 13,5 friends for a Dutch Twitter account, but lower than the 32 friends for an Italian Twitter account. Would this indicate that people in Southern Europe tend to have more friends ?

Top 5
http://twitter.com/FrikiTV - Friki TV - 370 friends
http://twitter.com/oSiNaReF - oSiRis NaReF - 257 friends
http://twitter.com/donjuan - Don Juan Tenorio - 236 friends
http://twitter.com/mmeida - mmeida - 199 friends
http://twitter.com/mnx - Manu Contreras - 183 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. 6% 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 Spain has 16,9 followers. For a Belgian Twitter account there were 10,5 followers, for a Dutch Twitter account there were 12,5 followers, for an Italian Twitter account there were 26 followers.

A ranking of Hispanic users of Twitter according to the number of followers can be found here. This list focuses on Twitter account where Spanish (the language) is used. The Twitter accounts in the list are from various countries, including Spain, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, ...

Top 5
http://twitter.com/edans - Enrique Dans - 486 followers
http://twitter.com/mnx - Manu Contreras - 374 followers
http://twitter.com/minid - Diego Lafuente - 314 followers
http://twitter.com/sblanco - Sonia Blanco - 240 followers
http://twitter.com/FrikiTV - Friki TV - 222 followers

Updates
Only 1% of the accounts from Spain are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Spain has 106 updates, compared to 72 for a Belgian Twitter account and 88 for a Dutch Twitter account, and 106 updates for an Italian Twitter account. Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/rmadrid - Real Madrid - 13462 updates
http://twitter.com/eldia - eldia.es - 4669 updates
http://twitter.com/tvitter - tvitter - 3415 updates
http://twitter.com/losantos - Jimenez Losantos - 2150 updates
http://twitter.com/valladolid - Valladolid - 1913 updates

Degree of activity
25% of all Twitter accounts from Spain with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts. For Italy this was 33%, for the Netherlands 10% and for Belgium 12%. 58% of all Twitter accounts from Spain with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Spanish 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 number of Twitter accounts in Spain is the highest for the four countries analysed until now. The number of accounts is still increasing. There is indication that the growth is slowing down. On 57% of the Spanish Twitter accounts at least one message was published in the last 7 days. This explains that there is a active Twitter community in Spain, more active than in any other European country according to Alexa.

PS. Suggestions for further states of the Twitosphere (new countries) are welcome. You can leave your comment below or you send me an email at Twitterfacts at gmail dot com.