44% of Twitter accounts owned by lurkers who’ve never shared a tweet
New research investigating the prevalence of ghost accounts on micro-blogging service Twitter has found that 44 per cent of all members have never composed so much as a single tweet during their time on the micro-blogging platform.
Conducted by Twopcharts the survey looked at activity across all 974m existing Twitter accounts, concluding that 30 per cent of all accounts had sent no more than ten tweets in totality leaving just 13 per cent of users to pump out 100 tweets or more.
Twitter publicly boasts having 241m active users in the last three months of 2013 but this figure simply counts those users who log in at least once a month – in other words there is no requirement to generate content.
The figures cast doubt on the degree of engagement Twitter enjoys with its audience suggesting a significant minority are content to be passive consumers rather than be active contributors.
This has particular ramifications for advertisers who are keener than ever to engage with consumers, with some wary at the high levels of churn evidenced on the micro-blogging platform. It is estimated that 542.1m accounts have issued one tweet or more since they were formed, more than half the total, but just 23 per cent of those have tweeted over the past 30 days.