When it comes to the total number of Twitter users, nobody I know had ever been able to get some information out of Biz & Co. So we are left with informed guesses. I fine method of guessing the total number compares different location based subgroups of Twitter users on TwitDir and Twitter. Because location is one of the things Twitter allows to search. So, inspired by this blog post, I collected a few numbers to make a guess at the number of Twitterati right now.
If you search for “Germany”, TwitDir is able to find 8,095 users while Twitter reports 10,145. So TwitDir only knows 80% of the people Twitter knows who entered as their location “Germany”. On the other hand there’s UK. Here TwitDir reports even less: only 65% of Twitter users. The numbers for France or Japan are in between the both.
Now comes the delicate part. We only can guess that TwitDir also knows about 65-80% of the total users. Currently that’s 3,011,532. So the magic number of total Twitter users should be between 3,500,000 and 4,500,000. Use at your own risk.
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Interesting. The last number I ‘heard’ a couple of months ago, was about 2-3 million. Is there any specific reason why Twitter doesn’t disclose its user numbers?
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[...] communities is illuminating. The total number of Twitter users is difficult to ascertain, but was recently estimated to be between 3.5 - 4.5 million and is certainly growing all the time. That makes the number of [...]