This post primarily discusses corporate uses and engagement with Twitter, unlike how most people use it to keep up with friends and discuss “What are you doing”? The # of companies on twitter is growing dramatically from fewer than 5 in 2007 to over 500 in 2008.

Given that twitter has about 1.3 million registered accounts, the question we get asked frequently is:

<Update>: Jason asks where we got the 1.3 Million number vs. 3.1 reported by TwitDir. Two items: 1) We only track accounts that have more than 5 friends and at least 10 tweets. We think these are real users vs. bots. If we did all accounts, we track about 3.27 Million. Bottom line there are a TON of fake accounts on twitter.

2) We also did this initial run in July. We’ll update for September, but we doubt There were 1.5+M accounts added in 2 months.

<End Update>

“So if I get on twitter and make a lot of “friends” will our messages get propagated faster?”.

This is usually by a corporate client, who does not have a basic understanding of twitter or has just heard that twitter helps you get “Buzz”.

Usually we have to go over basics of twitter and community with them before they ask the next question:

“So how can we can get the key influencers to follow us and tweet about?”.

Another discussion ensues and topics such as engaging users and not spamming them comes up. They usually look a little lost at this point, but are able to somewhat relate to email spam so they eventually get it.

The next question comes up within the 30 minutes of discussion:

“So how many people have to follow us for our message to be heard?”.

We’re not sure if you really want to answer this question, but its a worthwhile exercise. There are varying degrees of influence on twitter. We define 3 types of twitter engagement. Each of these types of engagement is an increasing amount of influence obviously:

1. Another twitter user follows you (and based on her tweet history) tweets at about the same time as you do. Else if you are in different timezones, your influence on that person is lesser.

2. A twitter follower replies to your tweets (@replies) with a certain frequency. Or the # of @ replies you get as a twitter user.

3. A twitter follower retweets your tweets with some frequency.

There are 3 things that stand out when you analyze twitter statistics.

1. The top 250 twitter users (with the most number of followers, the most number of friends (people they follow) and the # of tweets) carry an inordinate amount of “influence”.

2. The average number of followers for the top 100 twitters is 9304, with the top at about 93,000 followers and #100 at about 6300 followers.

3. If you have less than 100 followers (with some exceptions), which over 500,000 users on twitter do, your influence rank drops to less than 8 (give time zone considerations). Meaning less than 18 people are really viewing your tweets, which indicates 4 of them are likely to @ reply and 1 is most likely to retweet.

The graph below shows Twitter influence. The top 100 users carry 65% of the influence on twitter and they have a minimum of 6300+ followers to a maximum of ~90,000 followers. Users from 100-5000 have 22% of twitter influence and so on.

Some questions:

1. Corporate clients still believe the best use of twitter is to leverage it as “yet another channel” for their message amplification. What are the best techniques you have used to convince them about the value of engaging their customers on twitter?

2. How are you recommending your clients engage with twitter users?

3. What’s the best example of large companies engaging on twitter?