Twitter Stats


This from HotelMarketing.com

Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth. Social media analytics companies Sysomos conducted an extensive study on 11.5 million Twitters accounts to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it.

– 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.

– 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day

– 21% of users have never posted a Tweet

– 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.

– 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity

– New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009

– More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.

– There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)

– Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

There you are then! Find me on Twitter

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#followfriday or #traveltuesday


I take myself to be pretty dull on Twitter, and it’s taken me ages to understand #FollowFriday. So for those of you like me, read this from Mashable.

“What is #followfriday? Every Friday, you’ll see thousands of people on Twitter using this phrase, so we thought we’d take a moment to explain what Follow Friday is, and how you can join in with this Twitter game.

Here is a quick guide to the FollowFriday phenomenon:

1. #followfriday is a game in which people suggest who to follow on Twitter. It helps everyone find interesting Twitter users. You list the users you recommend following and add “#followfriday” anywhere in the Tweet so others can find it. The “#” is very important – don’t forget it!

Example Tweet (feel free to copy this and replace the Twitter names with your friends’ Twitter names and reasons to follow): #followfriday Team Mash: @mashable @adamostrow @sharonfeder @jbruin @adamhirsch @benparr @brett @tamar


2. You can find everyone’s #followfriday suggestions on Twitter search.

Then there’s this from Retnev
“When I started using Twitter one of the first uses of hashtags that I saw was #followfriday. What a wonderful idea! It was started by @micah and it is so easy: every Friday you use #followfriday to suggest people to follow. Simple, easy, and fun. An excellent idea!

But why do I say don’t do #followfriday? I started doing #followfriday and sent out my first #followfriday tweets just like some of the examples I saw: After doing a few #followfriday’s I realized that it is not really working. You write a tweet with the #followfriday hashtag and add people you think should be followed and you feel good because you did #followfriday and even better when you receive a recommendation.

But take a good look at the tweet. Why would you follow any of the people mentioned? Because I said so? Or because you like their usernames? And if you receive a lot of tweets like that, who do you follow? A tweet like that does not give you any reason to follow the people recommended.

@SharonHayes started doing #followfriday in a completely different way. She writes a post on her blog with her #followfriday recommendations and tweet about it. She is doing it this way because “I think that a simple 140 character recommendation isn’t enough. Like many others that use Twitter, I believe in quality over quantity” If you see one of her #followfriday posts you will understand what she means by quality!

There you are! I’m not so much into #followfriday yet, or#traveltuesday for that matter, but I’m certainly learning!

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Twittown

More about Twitter – this from Twittown (really!)

“Every day there are more and more “get followers” quick schemes floating around Twitter. We see them tweeted in our friends’ feeds, we see them on Twitter-based websites; in fact, we see them just about anywhere that there’s a place to advertise them. The thing is, as the more astute of you may already have guessed, those “get followers fast” schemes tend to work out about as well as those “get rich quick” schemes do – because at their core, they’re really not very different.

Ask yourself a very basic, simple, common-sense question. If get-rich quick schemes worked, why would the person selling them be selling them, instead of just using them him/herself? The same principle applies to Twitter followers. If there’s a quick way to get lots of high-quality followers, why would anyone share it, instead of just using it themselves? There’s no profit in sharing the technique – unless, of course, they’re selling it, which should make you realize that the followers they’re selling aren’t likely to be high-quality.

Just what is a “high quality” Twitter follower anyway? In a word: organic. High-quality Twitter users put their eyeballs directly on your status updates, which means that they don’t have an outrageous number of people they’re following. High-quality Twitter users click the links that you post and pay attention to the content on the pages that you lead them to. High-quality Twitter users write @replies and DM to their friends, indicating that they’re engaged. High-quality Twitter users give #followfriday recommendations.

Now ask yourself if you think you’re likely to find those kinds of users by clicking a “get followers fast” scheme. You see, on a certain level, those followers have to come from somewhere. I’m sure you don’t think that there’s a bunch of Twitter users out there, waiting for a service to tell them which people to follow. That means that most of these “get followers fast” schemes are scanning Twitter for people using auto-refollow features, meaning that if you follow them, they’ll follow you back. The schemers are sending those users to you in the hopes that you’ll follow them, and get a reciprocal re-follow back.

Don’t buy into it. Want good, high quality followers? Here’s my formula: set your Twitter client to display all tweets for a particular search topic that interests you (multiple topics are good too but don’t overdo it or you’ll run out your API calls). When you see an interesting post on a topic, give an @reply. Be nice. Be funny. You’ll probably end up with a follower. Follow them back – that’ll strengthen the relationship and ensure that you know what your followers are talking about. Take part in #followfriday. Most importantly, don’t spam your Twitter feed with endless URL’s – that’s guaranteed to drive high-quality twitter users away.

Don’t believe me? Try it.”

Great advice I think! Wish I really understood #followfriday but I guess I will eventually!

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Are You Taking Twitter Too Seriously?


I loved this from Paul Colligan:

“Are you wondering if you might be taking Twitter a bit too seriously?” Says Paul “I offer these 7 tell-tale signs that, well, yeah, you are taking Twitter too seriously.”

* You just Twittered “Where did I leave my keys?” and are really hoping someone responds.

* You’re about to make a business decision based on 140 characters from @nopictureandnojobbutitweetalot.

* You don’t eat until the Twitter Taco Truck tells you to.

* You think “the babes” will take you more seriously once you get your account verified.

* You know deep in your heart that @oprah wants to respond to you but can’t, cause of all that “legal stuff” she has to deal with.

* You have an entire page of iPhone apps dedicated to Twitter.

* You find this article funny enough to Tweet about.

Have a good one!

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HotelBlogs on Twitter

Guillaume Thevenot (pictured above), who hosts the much respected site HotelBlogs, is always on the ball especially when it comes to the internet. This is what he has to say about the future of Twitter. (As usual I think he’s probably spot on):

“I know a large number of people are still wondering what Twitter is for and why so much noise is behind it recently. Anyway, I let you judge for yourself whether Twitter is of good use for you. While I was browsing the Web to find out who is on Twitter, I discovered that the Design Style Online Magazine for Paris hotels Hoosta has a Twitter account and so does the hotel chain Tiara Hotels (2 hotels in France and 2 hotels in Portugal). And what do they do on Twitter? Hoosta asks Tiara Hotels if they can provide some pictures of their new hotel opening soon in Cannes.

Could it be that Twitter will become more efficient than emails for such a request? Looks like it, since Hoosta published a nice article about the hotel 3 days later (note also the quality of pictures and how fast they are displayed on the site…) So getting more and more proficient with Twitter, I have to say I tend to believe we have seen just the beginning of how people could efficiently use this new social media tool.”

I envy his ‘getting more and more proficient’ – I wish I was! Anyway find me on Twitter @livilodge. In a recent Twitter post Guillaume on Twitter @hotelblogs speculated that Twitter may be addictive – you try to stop and can’t! He might well be right about that too. I don’t think Chanters Lodge would have joined Best Of Zambia (at some cost…) on Twitter @thebestofzambia if they hadn’t been so active on Twitter. Certainly Twitter’s played an interesting role in the current political situation in Iran.

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