50 Twitter facts that’ll fascinate small businesses
MARCH 6, 2012 BY 53 COMMENTS
great article by Lilach Bullock
follow her at @lilachbullock
Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketer, Mumpreneur, Business Consultant,Mentor, Zumba addict. Want to know more www.socialable.co.uk
Most people who read my blog and know me will know how much I love Twitter. I find it fascinating how Twitter has grown, it really has had an exponential growth in terms of membership, usage and popularity so today I thought I would share with you 50 fascinating facts about Twitter:- 5 years ago Twitter was just an idea with only 3 people working on it.
- Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched on the 15th July 2006.
- Twitter’s origins lie in a “day long brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park and eating Mexican food, Dorsey introduced the idea of Twitter.
- The first Twitter prototype was an internal service for Odeo employees.
- The original project code name for the service was ‘twttr‘. It was inspired by the name of the site ‘Flickr’ and SMS short codes.
- The name was finalised as Twitter (as we know), meaning ‘chirps from birds’ and more relevantly ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’.
- The 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival was a pivotal point in Twitters popularity. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
- Twitter had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.
- In 2008 there were only 3 million registered users and only 1.25 million tweets per day.
- In 2009 Twitter had 8 million registered users.
- From 8 employees in 2008 to over 400 employees in 2011.
- Top 3 countries: US (107.7 million), Japan (29.9 million) and Brazil (33.3 million).
- It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to tweet to the billionth Tweet.
- Today it only takes one week for users to send a billion Tweets.
- In March 2010 the average number of tweets people sent per week was 350 million. In February 2011 the average number of tweets people sent per day was 140 million.
- The most popular Twitter user by number of followers is Lady Gaga. She has more than 18 million followers. She gains followers faster than Twitter adds new accounts.
- When Michael Jackson died (June 25 2009) there were 456 tweets per second (a record-breaker for its time).
- The current tweets per second record is 6,939 tweets per second. This was set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.
- On March 12, 2011, 572,000 new accounts were created on that one day.
- The average number of new accounts per day created in February 2011 was 460,000.
- The number of mobile users have increased by 182% over the past year.
- There are an estimated 225 million users in March 2011.
- In 2010, 25 billion tweets sent and 100 million new accounts were added on Twitter.
- The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on 22nd January 2010.
- 92% Reweet due to interesting content.
- 64% access through Twitter.com. 10% through Twitter client. 16% through mobile application.
- 69% decide who to follow through suggestions from their friends.
- The most Tweeted sports moment (and superbowl moment) of all time… @TimTebow game winning Touchdown pass to beat Pittsburgh in the first round of the playoffs.
- Twitter is ranked as one of the ten most visited websites.
- Tweets are mostly conversational (38%) and pointless babble (40%).
- Demographics of Twitter users: 54% female. 53% no kids. Users range from incomes of £0-30k (17%) to over £100k (30%). 41.5% are aged 18-39.
- Twitter is approaching 500 Million Users – Estimated to reach this in 8 days, 7 hours.
- Currently, Twitter is growing at over 1.123 million accounts per day, which amounts to more than 13 new accounts per second.
- In the 5 years since launching it has attracted significant investment funds with an estimated total capital raising of over $1.3 billion. The most significant investment was Digital Sky Technology in August, 2010, which was at over $800 million.
- In June 2011, it was announced that Twitter would be embedded in the new Apple mobile operating system. After the launch of the new Apple mobile iOS5 operating system, Twitter registered sign ups had increased by 300% per day.
- 60% of new users are coming from outside the U.S.
- 10 tweets per second mention Starbucks.
- IBM can predict wait times at airports by crowdsourcing information from tweets. They search tweets for mentions of airports, then send an @reply to the tweeters and ask them to reply with wait times.
- Scientists can tell with great accuracy where you are from just by the words you use in your tweets.
- People are more inclined to Tweet something negative than positive. 80% of customer service tweets are negative.
- Every public tweet since Twitter’s inception in March 2006 will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. IBM plans to map every archived tweet to Wikipedia, and tag it with sentiment, to make them more digestible.
- Twitter has been valued at $8 billion.
- 85% of recruiters use Twitter for recruitment.
- 81% of users follow less than 100 people.
- 61% of all tweets are in English.
- 5% of users create 75% of the content
- 75% of traffic comes from outside of the Twitter interface.
- 66% of questions asked have some commercial intent.
- Lilach Bullock started using Twitter in 2008 and currently have 58,572 followers
- Lilach Bullock have spent a record 4 hours on Twitter in one day…
