There isn’t any official number of how many users there are on Twitter, but I “think” I have managed to find the answer. Still, I could be wrong, but then again I could be right. However I feel that it’s fairly accurate (i’m confusing I know). Nicholas Carlson wrote an interesting post on how many users are active on Twitter, where he explained the amount of people who are active on Twitter, people who aren’t following anyone etc, but I wanted to know how many Twitter users are registered today.
Twitter is not like Facebook, where we are able to get data from socialbakers to find out the amount of Facebook users or the amount of Facebook ads.
Twitter doesn’t give out much data except that there are 175 million users on Twitter which was updated on October 2010, which is clearly a million years old ago and is outdated in technology age, just like the one on Facebook press.
So how many users does Twitter have today?
Answer: 277,559,946
How did I get the answer? I am PSYCHIC, which is clearly untrue… or am I? The real answer is found when I used Twitter’s official app on iPhone. In the app itself, every user was “given” a number. I figured that there was a purpose for this “number”. So I searched for the early adopters of Twitter, which were Biz and Ev, the two cofounders of Twitter.
I couldn’t find anyone who was #1 and my number was 15,458,378. So I thought that the number could be for when we registered on Twitter.
So I registered another Twitter account and the number was 277,559,946. I registered two accounts and the number continue to increase.
I believe that Twitter has 277,559,946 amount of users, which will change tomorrow or even as you are reading this, since Twitter has 460,000 accounts created per day. That is a lot, I know!
Until Twitter gives us an official number, I think this is fairly accurate.
Wow, Aaron you are smart dude. Really love this sneaky insights you can create, I remember a post you wrote about the amount of Facebook users, where you impressed me in the same manner. Keep it up man.
Oh wow, recent figures said 175 Mio, very glad this is not the case and Twitter is far bigger, still it would be very interesting to know if the 10-20% retention has increased in the post or if it remained the same, do you know anything about that?
Thanks for a great post. I WON’T put it in my Buffer, as the Topsy button fits the purpose better 🙂
LoL! thanks for the compliment Leo. Not smart. Just curious what everything was for. Haha! Either that or I have really itchy hands.
Cheers on the facebook users post too. I just post what I know.
I don’t know about the retention but I am sure we can find out together. Cheers man! thanks for retweeting this on buffer and on your personal account.
Sometimes it’s the simplest means that give the clearest results. Interesting to know the figure, given that 175 mil seemed pretty out of date by now.
Aaron, I think the earlier question on retention is interesting because there must be inevitable churn in registered accounts. I’m not talking about accounts in disuse (nonetheless counted), but the accounts created then purposefully deleted. I’ve deleted a few early false starts and created new Twitter account(s) along the way. So assuming an artificially low churn of 5% each year, I’d guesstimate further then that there could be 30 million fewer than 277 mm registered accounts.
On another note: I did a bit of sleuthing myself to figure out where you found the join #. Of course, the clue was your visual. I use Twitter clients other than “Twitter” app and am a new iPhone user, but just downloaded it to find my join #: 15,199,231. Found your math (and curiosity) interesting, because a similar fancy caught me recently and inspired my post on online “birthdays”: http://bit.ly/hGP15c.
Fatuous, fascile and a total waste of my time, just like twitter! God people really do need to get real lives and do something with them! The rubbish i received would amaze even the village idiot. What is the point of it all, or that just it… THERE IS NO POINT? How many people actually read tweets from twits anyway? Very very very few i suspect unless they are living at home with mum, have acne up to their eyebrows and like train spotting in their spare time; which of course they can’t do, because they are glued to computers and their twit friends.
Yeah! more like 100 million added since last October 🙂
Great post, i didn’t know i was able to check linkedin.
Well twitter is growing quickly and some people aren’t active like other users like just facebook having more than 600 million users.
We wouldn’t know unless twitter really show the data themselves.
I do 🙂
Hi Aaron – We’ve been running a “clock” on this for some time. We started with an algorithm based on official stats released by Twitter, then came across this same insight of account numbers which we update every couple months. You can see the live stats here http://bit.ly/dxCqXu
Nice bit of detective work, Aaron!
This is interesting but Facebook still beats them all:
===> http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
As a business, I like Twitter a lot as much as I do http://Identi.ca/ComMetrics (open source Twitter) but I use it probably like most of you to get information I need and to share what I find interesting with my small audience on Twitter.
Do people care? Well if 25% click on the URL you just posted, some apparently do? So I am not sure if Bewareonline has it totally right 🙂
By the way, there are worse things to waste time such as playing a video game or watching a TV re-run…. So off I am to cook dinner and enjoy the evening with friends and family, beats Twitter or Facebook conversations hands-down 🙂
Thanks Danny 🙂
Taking a look at it 🙂
I agree.
Some people just don’t see the point of using facebook or twitter. We can’t really blame them actually. I used twitter for 2 years and it has gotten me tons of opportunities, we just need to look at it the right way and not as a way to update what we had for lunch like what most people think.
Agree, there are most ways to waste time like you have mentioned. Indeed real time with family beats twitter and facebook hands down. having said that, my dad is on facebook and he is a busy man. I am in University and I see my family 3 months in a year. So dad checks out what I am doing on facebook and reads my blogs. 🙂
Cheers
Aaron
Aaron
I agree with you as well. Thanks for sharing.
That Twitter has more than a hundred million (read as; 100,000,000) more user accounts than they’ve stated, it makes me wonder what they mean by Users.
If; 277m accounts, and even (for example) 200m accounts accessed each day, that’s almost 1 in 3 which are dead logins. Makes me wonder if this is a relatively high or low amount.
Does Facebook actually have 800m accounts registered, with only 550m active? That’s not so good. But they won’t say.
It’s all about the significant figures, right? 😉
Well HELLO Sherlock Holmes hehe 🙂
Such great insight here – thank you Aaron.
Now I’m curious to know how many of those 277,559,949 + the 460,000 x3 (since 3 days since you wrote this post) are actually active on Twitter. Since as we know – a lot give up after a few weeks or months when they don’t take the time to see the true purpose of Twitter and what it can do besides having you share what you had for breakfast with your friends and followers lol.
Plus – like you said – they are “users” – which means they are not necessarily each a different person since I know many folks (and you now by having created a couple extra accounts to try this experiment) have multiple accounts. I know of some who have 6 and 7 even.
So if you can build an app for that – why you would be the master of Holmes hahaha. Just kidding – but I do wonder about that actually.
Great job you did here Aaron. Gotta’ love them iPhone apps eh?!
have a great weekend.
Cheers
That’s pretty fantastic Aaron! You’re certainly a very intuitive folk. What next? Maybe you’ll be estimating Twitter income?
I just created a new twitter account last night @WriteASong4Me and the number is 301,242,058. So we seem to have crossed the 300 million mark.
FYI.