Twitter botsAfter taking “An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World†last June, Sysomos Inc. has returned with a report called “An In-Depth Look at the 5% of Most Active Users.â€

In its original report, Sysomos crunched the numbers on pretty much every possible statistic related to Twitter: join dates, post frequencies, posters per city, and so on. One statistic—5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity—particularly struck the researchers, sparking the latest report, which zooms into that 5% to figure out who this small group is made of and what they’re posting about.

The biggest discovery of the new report is that 32% of tweets by the most active users actually come from Twitter bots, accounts set up to automatically post new updates. Sysomos says that percentage is probably higher for the most active users, since that statistic just looks at bots posting over 150 times per day.

Do not, however, be so quick to use this data to write Twitter off as useless noise and spam.

Though these bots are posting a quarter of all tweets on Twitter, they are actually potentially useful and interesting posts rolling out of accounts like “hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators.â€

The top three posters are @foxnews with 135.83 tweets/day, @moooris (posts only in Japanese) with 108.64 tweets/day, and @alohaarleen with 101.09 tweets/day.

Besides statistics concerning the very top tweeters, Sysomos also included a bunch of data and graphs covering the kinds of topics being tweeted the most about. Personally, as a technology industry journalist, these two facts stuck out to me as incredibly interesting:

For active Twitter user with more than 1000 followers, the leading keywords are “Internet marketer”, “Internet marketing”, “business marketing” and “entrepreneur.”

For active Twitters users with less than 1000 followers, the leading keywords are “Web designer”, “graphic designer”, “love”, and “Web developer.”

Twitter topics
Ignoring the inclusion of “love,†which seems to pop up just about everywhere in all kinds of human communities, every single phrase of the top leading keywords applies to information technology, business, and/or the Internet. Is Twitter really as cool as the media thought it was, or is it simply a love-fest for entrepreneurs and startups to network and discuss their new Internet ideas with each other endlessly?

We may not know now, but Sysomos appears to be onto something.

(image source: Martin Ruiz)

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