Mobile Apps Play a Surprisingly Small Role in Twitter Tweets

My long standing belief based on casual observation was that most tweeting was being performed using thumbs flying across a virtual keyboard or physical thumb keyboards on smartphones. However, according to Twitter (the firm) itself, this is not the case. 78% of tweets by people are created using the twitter.com website interface!

The Evolving Ecosystem

Twitter acknowledges that a given individual user may use more than one interface. So, the totals from the other major tweeting tools add up to more than 100%. So, what is the most used mobile Twitter creator? Why, none other than Twitter’s own mobile friendly page at m.twitter.com at 14%. Number 3 was even more surprising: SMS (text messaging) at 8% tied with the Twitter (formerly Tweetie) for iPhone app.

I added up the other mobile interface percentages (splitting TweetDeck & Echofon which combined their desktop and mobile clients together) and found that 42% of tweets from a given average user came from a mobile device.

The lesson learned, I believe, is that the path of least resistance is the one taken even with Twitter. The top 3 methods of tweeting all require zero app installation (Twitter.com, m.twttier.com, and text messaging).

FYI: You can find me on Twitter at: @ToddOgasawara

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