140Char

Twitterfacts

I went back to twitterfacts because it is awash with data about Twitter, and when I look at the numbers closely I come up with different conclusions.

About ten days ago, they were talking about the use of Twitter in France. It is really interesting, particularly the sentence near the end – Twitter doesn’t have a French version – or a German version, or Spanish version, or a Chinese version. Apparently, there is English and Japanese. So now you know.

So how do people in France use Twitter?

The take-up rate of Twitter in France, unlike Norway for example, is quite low. France has a population a little large than the UK, and it has about 6 000 active users – one per 10 000 men, women, children, and grandmothers.

The blog reports most of the data as averages, but it also produces bar charts, and I was able to look at modes and medians. The reason why I would look at modes and medians is that the data is usually skewed. There are lots of people who signed up and don’t use it much, and then a long tail going up to the heavy users.

So lets look at the modal activity

Following

A staggering 16% of tweeters in France are following no one. The modal number of followings, that is the number if you pulled a user out of a hat at random, is 1-4. The median, the point which marks the 50% least active and the 50% most active users, are following 5-9.

So, 1 in 6 are following no one. And 2 in 6 follow between 1 and 9 people. 3 in 6 follow 9 people or more.

Followers

4% of tweeters in France have no followers at all (no bots in France?). That is, 279 tweeters in France subscribed, and no one is following them.

The modal number of followers (pluck someone out of a hat at random) is 1-4 and the median (50:50 mark) is 10.

So the number of followers is higher than the number of people being followed? That makes sense. The difference is made up by bots from abroad.

Tweets

5%, or 1 in 20 users have subscribed and don’t tweet. I suppose they have abandoned the service.

The modal use is less than 9 ( 1 every 3 days) and the median use (the 50:50 mark) is 25. So, the top 50% of users are tweeting more than once a day, and the bottom half are tweeting less than once a day.

I think for this analysis, twitterfacts excluded people who had not tweeted for over a month or who had been members for less than a month. So for people who seemed to be “in”, the above conclusion is true.

Degree of activity

30% had tweeted in the last week. 17% last tweeted between 1 week and 1 month ago. 36% hadn’t tweeted for a month.

Privacy

12% of tweeters in France run an entirely private timeline.

Conclusions

So what do you make of this? Twitterfacts is optimistic – particularly if you are allowed to use French.

Why can’t you use French – surely you just type it? I just did.

PS If you are teaching introduction to statistics, this would be a great exercise on the central tendency.