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Twitter Study Shows When We Tweet

Twitter is climbing the charts as one of everyone’s favorite social media tools.  A new study released some interesting facts about the micro-blogging website, which allows you to send a message to all your followers in 140 characters or less.  Pingdom, a Europe based company, tracked Twitter for three weeks, trying to figure out when and how much users tweet.  It seems like a simple report, but it’s actually quite interesting.

Over the three weeks, the report found that on average over 27.3 million tweets were sent every day.  If you break that down, that’s an average of 1,138,772 tweets per hour.  It’s obvious and noted that Americans have the largest presence on the site.

The graph above shows the number of Tweets per hour between October 21 at midnight Eastern time, and ending on November 11.  As you can see there was an increase in tweets on October 27, reaching 1,841,289 tweets around the 8pm (EST) hour.  The report suggests that Twitter users were excited and gearing up for the 2009 World Series, which started the following evening.  The report also suggests that sometimes television shows play a roll in Twitter use.  Every Wednesday, since it’s premiere, Glee, has ended up as a trending topic, and has been the number 1 tweeted show.  However, October 27 was a Tuesday, and the report has no confirmation on what caused the spike.  Midnight going into Halloween was the least tweeted night out of all nights only reaching 566,854 tweets during that hour.  

Pingdom, took statistics for both Europe and America, and when it came to what day Twitter users tweet the most, the results were nearly identical.  Tuesday, seems to be the most tweeted day, while tweets are down over the weekend.  Pingdom attributes this to users tweeting while at work.  “We can’t explain it any other way, since weekends show decreased Twitter activity.”  This could soon change, since another recent report said that social media sites are taking $2.25 billion from the work place and now many companies are banning sites like Twitter from work computers.

When it comes to scaling challenges Pingdom says, ” we suspect that the amount of tweets passing through Twitter is not an issue for the service right now (the Fail Whale is a much rarer sight these days than it was in 2007 and early 2008). Any scaling challenges that Twitter has are most likely caused by the spreading and delivery of that data – data indexing, API calls from various apps, all the website visitors, tracking who should see whose tweets, etc. There’s an awful lot of extra work that Twitter has to do behind the scenes for each tweet.”

Although the report isn’t really surprising, it is quite interesting to see the specifics of when we tweet and when we don’t.  “As you know, Twitter has been growing like crazy in 2009 and is a moving target,” Pingdom said ending the report.  “Considering it’s already closing in on 30 million daily tweets, 2010 will be an interesting year for Twitter. Here’s something to think about: Once Twitter reaches 33.3 million tweets per day, the service will be processing a billion tweets per month.”  Currently we process about 10 billion tweets a year. 

Moving to a much smaller scale, TweetStats is a great tool for individual users to check the specific times and days of when they tweet the most.  The site also gives you a list of some of your most tweeted words.  TweetStats is updated often with user’s information, so checking back every few weeks, or once a month, is a great way to see your own Tweet statistics.