How People Post to Twitter

Posted on July 24, 2012
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What clients people use to post to Twitter. (HT: DF) I was pretty surprised how many use the web site. While the total number using apps dwarfs the web site the web site is still the number one way to post. I was also surprised at the number of Blackberry users. It also shows why Twitter for OSX has been so neglected. (2,446 posts vs. 152,116 for iPhone, 116,765 for Android, 115,244 for Blackberry and 9,603 for iPad) Of course posting and reading are two different things. Still I think that’s a pretty good indicator that the desktop isn’t where most people use Twitter.

Most surprising is that only 29.2% of people use third party Twitter clients. While in one sense that’s very low in an other sense it’s still high enough that I think Twitter would be making a big mistake if they drop 3rd party access. However including the website that’s still almost 71% using official Twitter clients. Which means that honestly they probably could piss off the tech nerds using clients like Tweetbot and not really have that big of an effect on their service.

You could argue that the people using 3rd party apps have a disproportionate influence. I’m not sure that’s true though. While I love following people in the tech circles like Marco Arment and others the fact is that most people follow celebrities or perhaps people dealing with news. Most of those people would likely just use the official Twitter client if the 3rd party apps they use stopped working. (Assuming they aren’t already using Twitter apps)

It’s also the case that a 3rd party service probably isn’t going to put Twitter out of business. There already are Twitter competitors and none of them are doing that well. The reasons are clear. The people people want to follow aren’t on them. Twitter has simply moved from being a service to talk with your friends into a different way to get your news. (Either entertainment styled news or real news)

I look at my own twitter feed and while I follow more tech folks than most would most of my feed are journalists, science writers or the like.

Also surprising is that notable Twitter clients like Twitterific didn’t show up at all.

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