It's been a tough month for Twitter, stats-wise. Compete and Quantcast posted their traffic stats for May, showing that Twitter's phenomenal growth has stopped or even reversed. Before that, a report from Harvard Business Review revealed that most Twitter users are passive, with 10% of all users accounting for 90% of the overall number of tweets. Now, Hubspot's report, based on some 4.5 million Twitter accounts, pretty much confirms this. Here are some of the highlights:
* 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
* 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
* 68.68% have not specified a location
* 55.50% are not following anyone
* 54.88% have never tweeted
* 52.71% have no followers
Sounds quite bleak, doesn't it? Especially the part that shows that over half of all Twitter users do not tweet at all. However, one has to take into account the fact that you can be a Twitter user without tweeting; you can merely follow other users. Therefore, Hubspot really labels a Twitter account inactive if it satisfies all of these three conditions: it needs to have fewer than 10 followers, fewer than 10 friends, and fewer than 10 updates.
By this definition, only 9.06% of all Twitter users are inactive, which sounds surprisingly good. What does this mean? Well, these numbers are certainly skewed by various spammy/bot accounts, but it definitely shows that you cannot take Twitter's inactivity numbers for granted. Some Twitter users don't tweet, but they follow other users. Some don't have a lot of friends, but they tweet a lot (for example, you could use Twitter to communicate with a small, closed group, like one's family or a group of people working on a project). Twitter is a versatile tool, and its usage patterns do not necessarily follow the usage patterns of other services.
The report also shows a number of other interesting stats. For example, very few users ever retweet other tweets, with overall percentage of retweets among all tweets being 1.44%. Replies, however, are used a lot; 33.44% of all tweets contain the "@" symbol. Another very interesting graph shows the distribution of tweet length; a vast majority of users are trying to cram as much text as possible in Twitter's 140 character limit, which suggests that increasing this limit somewhere along the line might be a popular move for Twitter.