Some Twitter statistics

John Bruner, at O’Reilly, took a random sample of about 400,000 Twitter accounts and looked at how many followers they had and how many they were following.  More than half of the accounts had no followers or only one, but that includes a lot of accounts that have never posted anything.  90% of accounts have 458 or fewer followers (@statschat has 608. Go, us!). Restricting to accounts that had posted in the past month, the median number of followers was 61, and the median number of accounts followed was 117, in contrast to the enforced symmetry of Facebook.

Some people, on the other hand, have lots of followers. Our biggest spike in readership this year was when @bengoldacre mentioned our Royal Baby Coronation Lifetables, and half a percent of his followers turned up within the next 20 minutes.

The Pew Internet Center did a survey of social media use in the US.  If you’re not familiar with Twitter, perhaps the most surprising statistic was than Black Americans are more likely to use it than others, even after you take into account that they are less likely to have internet access. Black Twitter is a thing.

At this time of year I’m probably supposed to give you a list of top statisticians to follow on Twitter. But (a) you can just see who I follow, and (b) that’s where a lot of the StatsChat links come from, so why would I want to encourage you?