What does the average Twitter user look like? Well according to new data, she’s an English-speaking female, 28 years old, carries an iPhone, has 208 followers, follows 102 people, tweets about fashion and family, and her favorite color is purple – not pink. “Family,” in particular, is the most popular category on Twitter, and “love” is the most frequently used word in a bio.
Beevolve, a social media marketing firm, conducted an “exhaustive study of Twitter users around the world,” which scraped publicly available information from 36 million Twitter user profiles to create a rather comprehensive profile of the average user.
The study even delves into the Twitter user’s background color preferences (excluding default colors), and separated the data by gender. Female users have a preference for using the color “eminence,” a variant of the color purple, overshadowing pink, which came in second place. Men, on the other hand, overwhelmingly prefer darker hues, with the color “shark” (a dark gray) topping the list.
Diving further into the details, the study finds that 53 percent of Twitter users are female and 47 percent are male. While the average user is 28 years old, there’s an overwhelming majority (73.7 percent) of users who fall within the between 15 and 25 years old age group. And while the fairer sex may outnumber men using Twitter, the 35+ year old age bracket is primarily male. It’s worth mentioning that there’s likely some discrepancy with the age groupings since just 0.45 percent of users make their age publicly available on their profile, and teenagers are more likely to disclose their age within their tweets or biography.
Most users were found to be following between 0 and 50 users, and correspondingly have 0-50 followers. What’s also revealing is that an average Twitter user has sent 794 tweets in the last three years, or approximately fewer than 264 tweets per year. Putting this into perspective, this data paints Twitter in a different light: With 365 days in a year, that equates to users tweeting once a day for just 72 percent of the year.
Twitter has been riddled with inactive accounts – as much as 50 percent according to Twitter’s own figures from last year – as well as a inundated with fake and spam accounts. While Facebook has very publicly taken a stand against faux accounts, Twitter has yet to really make clear how it intends to fight them. Either way, it’s clear Twitter is able to thrive on the activity of a fraction of users while the vast majority of them are barely touching the site.
Most users tweet using Twitter’s native app (77.3 percent of users) as opposed to a third-party app (music to Twitter’s ears), and users tweet from iOS devices (68.9 percent) more than Android devices (31.1 percent).
You can also check out further details about Twitter’s demographic in the study including unconventional verified users, the top ten users with the most number of tweets, as well as a heat map breaking down where tweets are coming from.
