Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) celebrated its 8th birthday on March 21. In just eight short years, the microblogging company has grown to have more than 242 million users worldwide. The San Francisco-based company has established itself as a platform to share news and views in 140 characters. Its application ecosystem, user interface, culture and geographical distribution have changed drastically since 2006.
Twitter has seen significant changes in user behavior
However, a user looks at the service as his or her own world of followers and followed. You can’t track whether every user’s behavior is changing with time or just that of a specific subset. Researchers at Northeastern University and Brown University have tried to quantify the evolution of users and their behavior.
Researchers note that the company has evolved significantly since its inception. Their findings are interesting to any Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) user and investor. They combined three datasets to analyze 37 billion tweets since March 21, 2006 to December 31, 2013. Here are some of their interesting findings (via The Atlantic):
1. An average TWTR user tweets about 20 times a month. That number rose above 26 in 2012, but fell to around 20 today.
2. Replies were once wildly popular on the platform. But retweets overtook them by the end of 2013
3. More than 55% of tweets contain the name of another user. The same is true for hashtags
4. Mobile devices account for more than 50% of tweets
5. Only 30% of its users are located in North America
6. English is by far the most popular language, followed by Spanish and Japanese
7. More than 30% TWTR accounts are inactive. In fact, the number of suspended and inactive accounts has grown rapidly over the past few years
8. About 10%-15% from 2009-2010 have been deleted or made private (or their accounts have been suspended)
9. People rarely change their Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) handles
Shares of the microblogging company skidded 1.31% to $46.68 at 3:22 PM EDT on Monday.
