A lot of activity on Twitter might well consist of bots talking to each other, according to a new report. Sysomos – which last month pointed out that 5 percent of Twitter’s users account for 75 percent of the site’s activity – has now indicated that many of the most dedicated users aren’t human.
Alex Cheng and Mark Evans wrote, “We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.”
But anyway, the pair continued, “Based on our previous ‘Inside Twitter’ report and this report on the most active users, 24% or one-quarter of all tweets overall, are generated by these very active bots.”
That may wind up being either a bad or good thing. Although folks who head to Twitter for human interaction are obviously in trouble, the prevalence of bots could go to show that legitimate companies are getting the hang of the site. And from Twitter’s perspective, they should represent a crowd ripe for monetization.
If you’d like to hear often from someone with an actual heart and soul, though, there are some options. Cheng and Evans found that Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan with an average of 43 tweets per day), Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki, 39 tweets daily), Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano, 37 tweets daily), and Jonathan Ross (@wossy, 37 tweets daily) are some of the leading human Twitter users.
