Rapleaf Study on Popularity of Twitter Clients

Given the myriad of Twitter clients available, we wanted to see which ones are the most popular. So, we studied the 20 most recent tweets from over 4 million Twitter users. Here’s what we found:

Most Popular Twitter Clients (as % of Tweets Sent)

Highlights

• Two-thirds of tweets are updated using computers at twitter.com; the second most popular client – mobile phone texting – only accounts for 1/10^th as many tweets
• Twitter clients have significant long-tail distribution – top 5 clients account for 82% of tweets; top 10 account for over 90% of tweets
• Roughly 20% of all tweets are sent from PDAs and mobile phones
• Tweets are sent from over 1900 Twitter clients

Concluding Thoughts

There are over 1900 Twitter clients available as Twitter’s open API makes it easy for anyone to build their own client. These clients follow a distribution to similar to Twitter users, with the top 10 services accounting for 90% of all tweets sent. With 65% of all tweets sent from computers on the official Twitter site and about 20% of tweets sent from mobile devices, there’s still a lot of room for Twitter to expand into the growing mobile sector. Whether this will affect the proportion of active Twitter users remains to be seen.