Is Twitter’s real user base around 20 million?

Apr 2, 2011 by Dirk Singer

How many people are really using Twitter? According to Twitter’s own stats, there are 175+ million registered users. But as Silicon Alley Insider points out that’s not the same as 175 million human beings, as it includes duplicate accounts and more to the point – dormant ones.

Last year RJ Metrics figured out that Twitter’s rate of churn was 83% – or rather this was the % of accounts that had seen no activity for a month, a pretty good indicator for lack of interest.

Silicon Alley Insider similarly decided to look at Twitter’s “real” user base, by looking at its API. It found that only 10% of Twitter users follow more than 50 people, while 38 million follow 16 – probably the minimum threshold at which you can make any real sense or use of the micro-blogging service.

From that you could draw the conclusion that Twitter’s actual user base is anywhere between 20-40 million (most likely at the lower end of that).

That does have the ring of truth about it, when you consider that Twitter’s penetration in the US and UK hovers around 12% and 8% of the Internet population respectively according to Comscore and Pew – this compares to 70% for Facebook.

Do these figures matter? In one sense not really – those of us who are very active on Twitter always knew that the network’s real and published size are not one and the same. And, Twitter is simply not a mass market service, rather its useful for targeting so-called influencers as the network over indexes with journalists and bloggers who will take what they read and amplify it on other media.

Also its worth noting the evidence that Twitter is starting to perform significantly better in emerging markets. Last Summer Comscore found that Twitter grew 305% in Latin America compared to 22% in North America.

And so, while Twitter penetration is 8% in the US, it is over 20% in both Brazil and Venezuela.