Twitter Users and application types

Certify and Increase Opportunity.
Be
Govt. Certified Twitter Apps Developer

Twitter users within the global Twitter community can be categorized according to different criteria. Based on the number of Twitter messages published and the number of followers I have identified 4 types of Twitter users.

Lurkers
A Lurker is a Twitter user who has published only a few messages and who has a limited number of followers (people reading his Twitter messages). Everyone starts as a Lurker.

Bots
A Bot is a Twitter account on which automatically generated messages are published. Such Twitter accounts can be set up to monitor website availability, to republish headlines of a news site or to indicate which songs have been recorded to name only a few examples of usage. These Twitter accounts have mostly only a limited number of followers and many many updates.

High Influentials
An High Influential is a Twitter user who publishes only a limited number of messages and at the same time has a whole herd of followers. High Influentials don’t write much, but they are read by many people.

Twitter Stars
A Twitter Star publishes many messages who are read by many followers. These Twitter users tend also to have many friends.

Twitterholic is a service that monitors the Twitter Public Timeline to identify the most popular Twitter users. Twitterholic publishes a top 100 by number of friends, a top 100 by number of followers and a top 100 by number of updates (messages published). I have created a graph with all Twitter users in one of these 3 Twitterholic top 100 lists taking into account the number of updates and the number of followers. The graphs show clearly the relationship between number of messages published (“updates”) and the number of readers (“followers”).