Have more than one follower on Twitter? You're doing very well

Now this is interesting. According to a report, the median Twitter account has – wait for it – a single follower! So, if you’re someone who has a modest tally that’s in double digits, or better yet, in triple digits, you should be very happy with yourself, because you’ve got Twitter figured out.

The report was headed by Jon Bruner for OReilly Radar and it went through several hundreds of spambots and dormant accounts to pull out some interesting figures about Twitter. Amongst the accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers. For those of you who have over a thousand followers, you’re a part of the 96th percentile of the user base on Twitter.

You're a big deal!

Burner went through sampling about 4,00,000 Twitter accounts for this test. The research also showed that active Twitter accounts follow a median of 117 users and a recurring trend was that many people – 76 percent of them – followed more people than the number of people following them. Mutual following is best left to #TeamFollowback, but the truth here is that if you have a Twitter account, chances are that you may be following more people and not having them reciprocate the move. Then again, there’s a good chance you’re mostly following celebrities.

When Twitter filed for its IPO a couple of months ago, the micro-blogging website claimed that it was serving 200 million monthly active users. By “active”, Twitter essentially refers to the number of people who’ve merely logged in during the past month. This research here, however, considers at least a single tweet made in the past 30 days as “active”.

The results cannot be taken at their face value, though, warns Burner. “Not that number of followers is an indicator of quality,” he says. “Twitter’s users are prone to swarms and fads; they flock to famous people as soon as they appear on Twitter, irrespective of both activity and brow height,”

(Cover image credit: Getty Images)