44% Of Twitter Users Have Never Tweeted (And Other Twitter Stats)

Data from TwopCharts shows that Twitter may not be as active as it seems to be. TwopChart’s data shows only 44 percent of Twitter’s 947 million accounts have never sent just one tweet.

Furthermore, about 43 percent of the 550 million users that have sent a tweet sent one tweet sent it more than a year ago. That leaves about 236 and half million users who have tweeted since April 2013. That’s right around how many "monthly active users" Twitter said it had back in November 2013 when it went public. Twitter said there are 232 million accounts that log in at least once a month.

So who owns all these inactive accounts? There are definitely a fair share of users who registered an account and quickly forgot about it (along with passwords, email addresses linked to that account, etc.), leaving a sea of lifeless accounts floating in the Twitterverse.

That may be the real tragedy for the everyday user. There are 700 million account names that can’t be registered by anyone else. So much for my chances of having that perfect first-last name combination handle. Go ahead, look up your @[insert first and last name] on Twitter. Chances are it was created more than two years ago and has little to no activity. Twitter is looking to fix this but there is no timetable yet.

There are also the fake accounts you see advertised across the Web that make users seem like they're way more popular than they actually are. Researchers found upward of 20 million fake accounts in 2013, they told NBC News. Fake accounts vary; some tweet, some have profiles and others are blank and easy to spot and subsequently get removed.

Whether they’re good accounts or bad accounts, they are incredibly easy to get and incredibly cheap.

There are also a number of accounts that do not tweet, but use Twitter as a news feed. TwopCharts does not take that into account, but Twitter does. A TwopCharts representative told the Hindustan Times that “Twitter can count users that don’t tweet as active users when they log in to Twitter and read timelines,” but added that many of the accounts that haven’t ever tweeted “can indeed be considered dormant.”

A Twitter spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the company does not comment on third-party data. You can see TwopCharts’ Twitter Activity Monitor here.