A new study from Sysomos reveals that 42% of tweets are being made by non-officials applications. What’s more surprising, however, is the that Twitter stated just last week that “90% of active Twitters users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.” Twitter’s Ryan Sarver made the revelation during the announcement of the microblogging platform’s changes to its API rules.
Sarver’s claims quickly drew skepticism given that previous studies by Sysomos also suggested that there were “significantly more non-official users.” For example, in a June 2009 report, Sysomos found that TweetDeck had claimed approximately 20% of the client market.
To determine usage of different Twitter clients, we reviewed a sample of 25 million tweets on March 11 – the day Twitter unveiled its new API policy. The data shows that 42% of tweets were made by non-officials apps – more than four times the amount claimed by Twitter.
According to Sysomos’ findings, the most popular non-official apps and clients were TweetDeck, UberSocial and Echofone.
So what accounts for such a wide gap in the findings made by Twitter and the folks at Sysomos? “Twitter’s number focus on the total number of user’s while our analysis looked at total tweets. It means there may be many Twitter “official” users who are not very active.”
To read the full report, click here.
