As always, great job Mike Volpe! I can always count on HubSpot to deliver great information!  
 
I will share this with my network! Who wants to join me on Twitter? My Twitter Id is KenE3C!  
 
Keep us the great work HubSpot!  
 

Good summary. No big surprises. I've been watching the adoption rate grow unscientifically through buzz and increased activity among brands. I'm amazed at the activity on Twitter 7 days a week. It doesn't stop. Looking forward to updates to this data.

What I find interesting is that this research seems to suggest that the best days of the week to release a product or blog post and promote it through Twitter would be Wednesdays and Thursdays. Interesting.

In my experience,people generally have more time for frivolous internet activities on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The rush is mainly in the beginning and end of the workweek. Those middle days are when I get the most hits on my personal weblog too. 
http://susanimate.spaces.live.com

The tweets-by-day breakdown is very interesting; I always associated "social" media with heaviest weekend use. Looks like I was dead wrong. (My new theory? Over the weekend, people have the time for real socialization.) 
 
@Susanimate: The "midweek goof-off" theory is interesting. It helps explain the shape of that M-F lump.

Cool ... I tweeted the report :)

Informative data Mike. It would be interesting to compare this data 4 months from now. 
 
Can you write a blog post on how to balance and better manage tweeting time and work time? :)

Great report,... I twitter it ! struggling to get the webminar to work but will keep trying, Follow me on twitter @delphrb

Way out there at the end of the tail are users that sign-up but do not "get it". I was that way in March when I first got on Twitter. I did not like the stream of text messages to my cell phone. I thought Twitter was a texting thing. @Mediaphyter kept encouraging me to give it another try. As I am re-launching my blog as a stand alone destination site away from ZDNet and IDG I think I am discovering the power of Twitter. I can't say I have it completely figured out but it seems to work for me.

tweeted this: @hubspot and @grader have released their 'state of the twittersphere' report. interesting stats on the tool we use. http://twurl.nl/08l4gy  
 
Pointed at and commented on the techcrunch article because i found it first. 
 
Nice job guys. keep up the useful work.  
 
I'm curious, you guys are inbound marketing specialists - how has grader affected your business/revenues?  
 
Take care 
mjl 
 
twitter.com/mlaine

I don't want to give Obama credit for the big salad but you can really see where the press about his use of social media in his campaign directly corresponds to spike in users. Viral indeed! And as always, GREAT JOB GUYS!

"There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow" 
 
Any specific data on this? It looks almost 1-to-1 in most cases.

What about spam accounts? How do those get weeded out?

Great report HubSpot. I am new to Twitter in 2008 (as in about a few weeks ago) so I am one of your stats! It took some time to get up to speed with Twitter but now it adds value to my work on a daily basis. 
 
twitter.com/matthewdiehl

This is some very insightful information to provide to clients on why they should be on Twitter. Thanks.

Mike: 
 
The growth curve reminds me of my time as Product Manager for Instant Messenger. The usage stats are similar as well (although I would have thought Mondays would be the biggest day of the week). 
 
Thanks for bringing Twitter to my attention (as well as the advice on SEO and Blogging). It's a great way of reaching new prospects. And it's an interesting community. 
 
Sam

Nice stuff Mike. Would love to see a chart showing Tweets by hour. A pivot showing usage trends (day and hour) cross-referenced by grade would be awesome. Are there times when the 95+ crowd congregates?

Thats great but how much money are they making? Oh wait.. they aren't. Ok, here is another question. When do they plan to be profitable? Oh wait they don't. Enough said..

Interesting that so many have little or no friends and followers and so few have a large following. 
 
I suspect that a lot of people sign up when a friend uses the "Find People" link and then never actually use it. 
 
When I invited my address book and then check up on them a few months later, over 1000 of them had not ever updated. 
 
@wbaustin 
 

I enjoy HubSpot and Mike and his team's shared perspectives on social media. Making the most of  
 
Twitter Time......???????........aren't we all trying to figure THAT out. 
 
 
 
Thank you / Gracias for more insight into TwitterTown! 
 
 
 
Boca Beth

Twittersphere is growing strong. Blogosphere is growing strong. What about the atmosphere: http://bit.ly/17nPk

Awesome report Mike. And congrats on the great coverage - what a way to end the year!

Twitter is outa this world!

Very nicely done, Mike!

Very interesting. I'm pretty much just getting into all of this but the data helps me understand a lot in key areas. Thanks will tweet 
 
http://www.twitter.com/daveydz3

I'm sorry, but they're not called 'tweets'- they are called either toots or twats.

HubSpot estimates that Twitter has 4 to 5 million users, 30% of which are "brand new or unengaged."  
 
Twitter's a niche. It's not mainstream. It never will be. It has no business model. It's a tool for white elites. Nothing more. A year from now, it'll be history, just like pets.com.

How many had no tweets? How many accounts are suspended in a thirty day period?

"Twitter's a niche. It's not mainstream. It never will be. It has no business model. It's a tool for white elites. Nothing more." 
 
 
last time i checked, no one was doing sociological studies on the income, level of education, race, etc. of twitter users. that information isn't requested when you sign up either.  
 
or are you saying that twittering makes me "elite" somehow? if you're definiting "elite" as making a lot of money or having a traditional education, i can't say i resemble that remark. and since most of the people i follow on twitter are my real-life friends/acquaintances, they don't resemble it either in race or in income.  
 
- @xaotica 
 

Mike, great work from you and the team.  
 
I think one of the key indicators missing from the report (but I know top of mind with you and the team) are the number of twitter support sites and apps being released.  
 
We made Twitter Integration a base element of our online media distribution service. You truly can't leave home without it. 
 
Keep it happening. You Hubspot folks have grown up awfully fast. A big congrats. 

Very interesting mike. Not many have 100+ Following them. A lot just take  
advantage of the tinyurl function and build links back to their websites.

We just crossed 2,000 followers so this is very interesting data to see how we are doing. Thank you

Nice summary of data Mike! Not surprised by the stats but interesting to see it all put together. What I will find even more interesting is how this either stays the same or changes in 2009.

Great visualisation of data on Twitter us! Do you have any idea where to find information on statistics on tweets? I mean to see how often a certain user or tweet has been viewed.

Very very interesting. I would love to see how the stats work out mid-2009. 
 
 
 
http://twitter.com/thinkergonemad

Excellent job pulling and presenting the data!  
 
All the best, 
 
Wayne 
@WayneNH

I love the visual presentation. Next I would like to see revenue and click through statistics. 
 
 
 
@ClayFranklin

Great job on the report! Nice to see interesting data on Twitter. I was a bit surprise at the % of followers being so low for a high % of Twitter users. Approaching 5,000 followers myself for Anteek and http://Web20Portals.com/ I was also surprise there was no category for that! I know there is more Twitter users with higher amount of followers and it would be nice to see a category for that in future report. 
Anteek 

Interesting facts and figures Mike, thanks for compiling and sharing. Looks like Twitter is going to be HUGE.

The figures about Twitter are cool. Am eager to see it grow like Facebook or Myspace.

When the "tit-4-tat" software was developed where there was an automatic follow-back when you followed someone I though maybe that  
Twitter was doomed. However, I see Kawasaki with 45,000 followers and realize there's no other way to do it. Then comes the quality vs quantity argument. I've gone for the quality and I have about 115 followers and follow about 130.  
So I guess I'm in the right hand side of your curve. So far, twitter has helped me get to know some important connections, so it's working for me.  
Thanks so much for the info! 
 
Shirley  
shirleyderose.com

Very curious that mid-week Twittering is the most dominant. Very curious indeed. I have a theory brewing in my brain somewhere, but it's not fully cooked yet.

So, I've been noodling, blogging, and presenting about the idea of a Social Media/Networking DJ's...How can organizations best synthesize their content for twitter and comb through the twittering to advantage their marketing spend?

Great market info on Twitter. Btw, how did you create the Tweet It badge? Is it part of some Twitter Tools? 
 
Thanks, 
 
Ed Bisquera

The sample universe are just twitter users who have signed up to grader. Is that correct?

Thanks everyone for all the comments and suggestions for the next report! 
 
 
 
@mlaine - Twitter Grader has generated a lot of "free" traffic and leads, and a lot more attendees to our webinars. It's been great. 
 
 
 
@Rob Sandie - We did not look at spam accounts in particular, but twitter does try and weed them out from time to time. 
 
 
 
@Marketing Ninja - Yes, followers to following is roughly 1 to 1, excpet that new users follow more than follow them, and very popular users have more followers than people they follow. 
 
 
 
@Jason Baer - Good ideas. We'll see what we can do for Q1 2009. 
 
 
 
@Shaun Dakin - More good ideas. We'll see what we can do in Q1 2009. 
 
 
 
@xaotica - Here we use the word "elie" on Twitter to mean the most popular and influential people on Twitter. It has nothing to do with education or income. it is purely based on your status within Twitter. 
 
 
 
@Mark Alan Effinger - Yeah, that would be cool to know the number of Twitter "apps", but unfortunately we don't have that data. 
 
 
 
@artgrrl - The only company that has data on how many times an individual Tweet has been viewed is Twitter themselves, and even their data will be inaccurate because of all the different software people use to access Twitter. 
 
 
 
@direstraits94 - Sort of. They are all of the users who have had reports run about them on Twitter Grader, but they did not have to sign up for anything, or even run the report on themselves. People run reports on their friends all the time. We think that 600,000 users is more than 10% of the Twitter user base and is a very statistically significant sample. 
 
 
 
@Ed Bisquera - I programmed the "Tweet It" badge in HTML. You can try an alpha version we built for you to use here: http://twitter.grader.com/tweetit

I knew when I joined twitter several months ago how important it was for the marketing of my website development company, but I had no idea how big it is, or how much it grows on a daily basis. The good thing about that is the fact that it's just that many more people to connect with, the bad news is it's almost too many people to try and connect with. I'm finding that I can only focus on about 10 of my followers, but that may also be because they are the ones that are the most active. That may be explained by some of the stats you have here. Very interesting information, thanks.

Another report has also been published recently.  
 
titled "Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope", it has been published by First Monday.  
 
First Monday is a peer reviewed journal on the internet. 
 
Link to report  
http://twurl.nl/17mrcz 
 
This is the Abstract for the report 
 
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Interesting, no doubt, though I am hungry for more qualitative info vs. # of followers, etc. I like to use Twitter to find things that interest me so I tend to follow people based on the nature of their tweets. I generally notice 3 types of twitterrers: connectors(people who post links to what they are reading, etc), marketers (people who are linking to their own blogs/products/services), and narcissists (people who tweet about what they are doing, what they think, etc). 
 
It would be interesting to see data through this type of lens. A friend of mine recently got into Twitter and was initially focused on getting followers. So, to this end, he began following a lot of people/entities. The other day he began tweeting about a change of heart. He wasn't getting anything from gaining followers. He just had a tweet stream 10 miles long. Obviously, people have different personalities, needs, etc., and therefore use Twitter for various reasons.  
If I have time I will create an open survey asking about how and why people use Twitter and will post the results. 
 
Thanks for the insights!

Looks like the link for "tweet it" is broken.

Mike, Cool report. Thanks for pulling it together. Quick question... did the folks at twitter respond to your post? I'd love to hear how your estimates jive w/their numbers.  
 

Twitter did not respond.

I've been receiving some mails from you and I don't pay attention to it but now that I came here, I realized that I wasted times for not checking it out earlier. Thanks for all your help! I learned a lot from you!

Te lo digo en español, que es la lengua que te enseñamos, felicitaciones por el laburo, che. 
 
Bueno, la variante es porteña pero vale. Un beso,Patricia

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