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Writers who cover Twitter find the grandiose irresistible: nearly every article about the service’s IPO this fall mentioned the heroes of the Arab Spring who toppled dictators with 140-character stabs, or the size of Lady Gaga’s readership, which is larger than the population of Argentina.

But the bulk of the service is decidedly smaller-scale–a low murmur with an occasional celebrity shouting on top of it. In comparative terms, almost nobody on Twitter is somebody: the median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers. If you’ve got a thousand followers, you’re at the 96th percentile of active Twitter users. (I write “active users” to refer to publicly-viewable accounts that have posted at least once in the last 30 days; Twitter uses a more generous definition of that term, including anyone who has logged into the service.) 

Active Twitter accounts follow a median 117 users, and the vast majority of them–76%–follow more people than follow them. Which brings to mind both discussions about the mathematics of pairing and studies that suggest reciprocated friendship is both rare and valuable. Here’s the histogram from above with the distribution of number of accounts that users follow superimposed. 

Far more inscrutable than the famous zombies are the anonymous ones, like a Wayne Rooney fan account, a skin-care promotion feed, and a fake Taylor Lautner account that each managed to amass thousands of followers with just a single tweet. (The commercial accounts of this sort are probably the result of promotions–“follow us on Twitter for a discount!”–that got no follow-up, or are the beneficiaries of bot armies hired to make a business look popular.)

Twitter is giant, and it has an outsize influence on popular and not-so-popular culture, but that influence seems due to the fact that it’s popular among influential people and provides energetic reverberation for their thoughts–and lots and lots of people who sit back and listen.

How you stack up

The technical mumbo-jumbo

Twitter assigns each account a numerical ID on creation. These IDs aren’t consecutive, but they do, with just a few exceptions, monotonically increase over time–that is, a newer account will always have a higher ID number than an older account. In mid-September, new accounts were being assigned IDs just under 1.9 billion.

Every few minutes, a Python script that I wrote generated a fresh list of 300 random numbers between zero and 1.9 billion and asked Twitter’s API to return basic information for the corresponding accounts. I logged the results–including empty results when an ID number didn’t correspond to any account–in a MySQL table and let the script run on a cronjob for 32 days. I’ve only included accounts created before September 2013 in my analysis in order to avoid under-sampling accounts that were created during the period of data collection.

Twitter IDs are assigned at an overall density of about 63%–that is, given an integer between zero and the highest number so far assigned, there’s a 63% chance that a Twitter account has been opened with that number at some point. That density isn’t constant over the whole range of ID numbers, though; Twitter appears to have changed its ID-assignment scheme around July 2012. Before then, Twitter assigned IDs at a density of about 86% and afterward at 49%. Jon Bruner Designing great data products The next 10 years of Apache Hadoop

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