1,200 Tweets per Second (And Other Interesting Twitter Stats)

Guest Post by: Hamid Sirhan

Twitter is growing both in terms of users, the number of messages being created and the importance that people place on the service.

In a recent presentation from Raffi Krikorian, Twitter’s lead on Application Services, we got an insight into how Twitter is being used and some current statistics. The most interesting of these are below, and the full presentation is at the end of this post.

• There are currently 110 million tweets per day from the 200 million registered users.

• The current rate of tweeting is 1,200 Tweets per second (tps), but these increase during dramatically important events. The Superbowl at one stage saw 4,064 tps with the second highest peak during the superbowl was during the half-time ads rather than the game itself.

• Twitter generates 10TB a day. That’s ten times what the New York Stock Exchange produces. It’s all generated from 140 character tweets which are individually 200 bytes per tweet. A phenomenal amount of text.

• There are currently 200m registered users with a growth continuing at a higher pace than before.

• Top three twitter-users by number of followers  – @ladygaga (8.3m), @justinbieber (8.1m), @barakobama (7.0m)

• This Twitter density map (below) shows that Twitter is most popular in Western Europe, Japan, the USA and parts of South America. What might be surprising is that it appears to be especially popular in Indonesia, with some good activity in the Malaysia-Singapore area. You’ll notice that it doesn’t seem too popular in Africa with a couple of exceptions on the West Coast and the city-centres of the Middle East (you can quite clearly see Cairo and what appear to be the Amman – Damascus – Tel Aviv trifecta).