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How Many Australian Twitter Users Are There? And What Clients Do They Use?

The TLDR summary:

  • There are 679,000 Australians on Twitter.com
  • Twitter.com market share has grown over 1000% since the start of the year
  • Only 44% of Tweets originate from Twitter.com


Last month, I guessed that there were around 300,000 Aussie Twitter accounts.

I was wrong.

March’s results are in, and Hitwise announced Twitter.com had 1000% growth since January 2009 (market share of daily visits):

Meanwhile, Nielsen Netview reported that 679,000 Australians visited Twitter.com in March 2009.

source: Nielsen Netview, March 2009, Twitter.com unique audience

Now, what do these two reports mean?

Are there 679,000 Australians on Twitter?

The short answer is yes. The long answer, no.

Let me explain.

Methodology of Hitwise and Nielsen

Hitwise reports on the market share of daily visits to Twitter.com, compared to all other websites. It’s not reporting the number of Twitter accounts, or even the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com. This is because Hitwise data is collected from the weblogs of some, but not all Australian ISPs.

Meanwhile, Nielsen’s Netview reports on the ‘unique audience’ to Twitter.com over March. It also uses a survey panel, which is then used to represent all of Australia.

This leads to an important point: these reports only measure visits and users of Twitter.com, disregarding Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Tweetie.

How Many Twitter Users Use A Twitter Client?

The Jan-09 client stats from tweetstats creator Damon Cortesi showed 56% of tweets do not come via the web interface:

Jan-09 Twitter Client Stats (based on +50 million tweets):

So now it should be a breeze to calculate how many Aussie Twitter users there are right? We know how many Aussies visited Twitter.com and how many tweets are posted outside of the twitter.com interface.

Nope.

What about the people who use more than one Twitter client? For example, if you tweet via twitter.com, tweetdeck and a mobile client, you’d be counted three as three users even though you are using the same username. How do you filter out the duplication?

After pondering this for a while, I came to the conclusion that the most accurate method would be to ask Damon of Tweetstats to calculate from his tweet sample the average number of clients used per user!

I also came to the conclusion that the lazy method is to assume the vast majority of Twitter users _would_ visit the Twitter.com site at least once a month - to update their profile, use search.twitter.com or to vanity check their profile etc.

The best answer is of course, ask @twitter, except they are notoriously secretive on the subject of just how many twitter users there really are. (For example, Twitter IDs are no longer sequentially generated and @biz went on to tell @jkottke:

“However, the way we number Twitter updates has switched back and forth a few times which pretty much screws up the exactness of your analysis.”)

Therefore, if anyone asks you how many Australians are on Twitter, just say 679,000!

  1. shor posted this