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Silent birds: 44 percent of Twitter users have never tweeted

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If you live-tweet everything from your lunch to your horrible date, you’ll be pleased to know that you’re more rare than previously thought. According to a report from Twopcharts, a website that tracks Twitter users by language and city, about 44 percent of the 974 million users on Twitter have never tweeted. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, Twopcharts is unable to track when a user logs in to an account and can only tell when an account tweets or retweets a message. Previously, the website came out with a report that said that only 40 percent of the 20 million new accounts on Twitter each month send at least one tweet during the first month that they signed up. 

In its company announcements, Twitter does not usually provide information on how many users have sent out tweets. It usually keeps track of monthly active users. An account does not need to tweet to be considered active. A monthly active user is defined as someone who has logged on at least once during a month. We assume this means Twitter has a lot of lurkers, watching feeds but not responding to them.

According to Twitter’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its IPO in October last year, the company has more than 215 million active users and 100+ million monthly active users. Those users are responsible for over 500 million tweets a day. 

Even without sending a tweet, there are still benefits to Twitter, so these stats do not necessarily  mean that Twitter’s appeal is waning. However, the report does show that speaking one’s mind may be more cumbersome with the limitation of 140 characters or less. According to the report, only 30 percent of Twitter accounts have sent 1-10 tweets while only 13 percent have sent out at least 100 tweets.

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Christian Brazil Bautista
Christian Brazil Bautista is an experienced journalist who has been writing about technology and music for the past decade…
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