New data released by Sysomos has revealed that only 58% of tweets come from official Twitter clients.
This statistic comes in response to a claim made by head of platform and API at Twitter, Ryan Sarver, who said that “90% of active Twitters users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.”
Sarver shared this statistic during an announcement last week, in which he explained changes to Twitter’s API rules.
Sysomos’ review sampled over 25 million tweets on the day that Twitter announced their new API policy – March 11 2011.
It revealed that 42% of those tweets were made by non-officials apps, more than four times the amount claimed by Twitter.
The most popular third-party app was TweetDeck, accounting for 5.5% of all tweets and 13.1% of all tweets from non-official apps. Following closely were UberSocial and Echofon.
So why is the gap between Twitter’s claim and this data so vast?
As Sysomos explained, Twitter’s numbers focus on the total number of users while the analysis above looked at total number of tweets. It means there may be / almost definitely is a significant number of ‘official’ Twitter users who are not very active.
For example, If in one month you send 99 tweets from a third-party client and 1 from an official client, you’re part of Twitter’s 90% of ‘official’ active users. Clearly different people have different perceptions of ‘active’.
The research also found that the most enthusiastic Twitter users are opting to use third-party clients rather than official clients – not too surprising when you look at the advanced features available from clients such as TweetDeck and Ubersocial.
