Twitter homepage still most popular client

Second-place winner, TweetDeck, beats out the third-party clients by a long-shot

Do you pay close attention to where the users you follow tweet from? "About 3 minutes ago via twitterfeed." "About 5 minutes ago via bit.ly." "About 6 minutes ago via Facebook."

Despite the overwhelming abundance of third-party applications, Web sites, and clients from which users can tweet from, a new study from business intelligence and analytics provider for social media, Sysomos, shows that nearly 47% of Twitter users still use the plain old Twitter Web site for all their tweeting needs. In its 5-month analysis of over 5 million tweets, Sysomos found the runners-up to Twitter.com to be popular third-party clients, like Tweetdeck, with 8.5% penetration, and Tweetie, at 3% penetration.

In addition to being the number one third-party client for tweeting, TweetDeck also proved to be the number one hub for the most popular tweeters, with the average user tweeting 1.24 times a day. Clients Seesmic and HootSuite are not far behind, seeing 1.18 and 1.11 tweets/day, respectively. Not surprisingly, Twitter.com falls far lower on the list, with just .67 tweets/day. This makes sense since a user who installs TweetDeck is much more likely to be a user interested in using their Twitter account often, while a Twitter.com user could easily be somebody who signed up to test the service just once.

TweetDeck for iPhone suffered a brief outage last Monday, when Apple pulled the app from the App Store due to a crippling bug. Immediately responding with a 1.1.1 version update that fixed the bug, TweetDeck returned to the Store shortly thereafter. The latest version of the app incorporates video uploading, Twitter trending topics, as well as support for Facebook integration, something that we're seeing being introduced on more and more Twitter clients.

What application or Web site do you use to update your Twitter account?

(front page image source: HONGKIAT.com)