44% of Twitter users have never tweeted: Report

NEW DELHI: Twitter has become something of a digital echo-chamber where it is easy to create a buzz around a topic. But a report by Twopcharts, a firm that monitor Twitter usage, reveals that nearly half of the Twitter users have no say in the conversations on the social media site. At best these Twitter users are spectators of the debates that rage on trending. At worst, these accounts are just dormant.

The Twopcharts report says that 44% Twitter accounts have never sent a tweet. For Twitter, which is trying to show to advertisers that it is a medium through which they can reach out to consumers, the number of Twitter users who don't even tweet is alarming.

Twopcharts also told Wall Street Journal that "30% of existing Twitter accounts have sent 1-10 tweets (and) only 13% of the accounts have written at least 100 tweets."

Twitter says that it has 241 million active users. Twitter reportedly defines an active user as someone who logs into the account at least once a month.

The number pales in front of Facebook, which has over 1 billion active users. After its IPO, Twitter is actively trying to grow the user base but is finding the going difficult. It is believed that the current format of the website makes it harder for mainstream consumers to follow topics or take part in the conversations. Recently, Twitter redesigned the profile pages for users, making it look more like Facebook profile pages.

The Twitter team also wrote several guides explaining concepts like 'retweet' and 'favourite' so that the new users can understand the service better.

Usually it has been a small number of high-profile users who have made most of Twitter. BeeVolve, an analytics firm, found in 2012 that 81% Twitter users have less than 50 followers. The number of people with more than 5,000 followers was less than 1%. It also found that the majority of users (74%) follow less than 50 accounts.

However, at the same time the way Twitter works has also allowed people with almost no connections to say something and reach out to millions across the world. The prime example of this is the tweet made by a young medic worker in Ukraine in February when she was shot in the neck by a sniper. She was taken to a hospital and survived but before the help arrived, the medic had tweeted, "I am dying" in Ukrainian. The tweet made news across the world after it was retweeted over 6000 times.