How Canada Stacks Up Against the World on Twitter

Social media marketing firm Beevolve analyzed 36 million Twitter accounts in what is possibly the most exhaustive study conducted of Twitter (besides Twitter, of course, which regrettably is not transparent with most statistics).

The study reveals a variety of cool facts about the microblogging platform slash real-time information network slash social network. Did you know that 74% of Twitter users are aged 15 to 25? You can thank Justin Bieber with his 29 million followers for that.

The average number of followers a Twitter user has is 208, according to Beevolve. They follow on average 102 people. 6% of users have no followers and 10% are following no one – likely fakes or abandoned accounts. 12% of users have protected accounts, which have on average just 47 followers.

There are some gender differences also. Girls love purple backgrounds, while boys love grey backgrounds. And women tweet more – an average of 610 tweets per female account compared with 567 for males. In Canada, 51% of Twitter users are female and 49% are male.

Canadian users account for 3% of all Twitter users. This may sounds small but not really. We rank fifth globally, behind the US, the UK, Australia, and Brazil. Australia, with a 4% share and a population of less than 23 million, leads the world in penetration. But Canada, at 3% and 34 million people, is not far behind.

However, Twitter remains a US-dominated network: 51% of users are American. 17% are UK.

iPhone users favour Twitter over Android users. Apple’s iOS holds more than twice as much marketshare for mobile Twitter than Google’s platform.

The only thing we can’t garner from this study is how many Twitter users exist today. Some studies suggest more than 600 million accounts have been registered, but the active user count is much different and completely unknown.