Hey, Twitter less popular already

you don’t say.

I keep arguing in conversations with friends that – once some solid metrics start emerging about the cost/benefit of investing in social media – I think we’ll see cooler heads prevail.

This sort of sets the stage for that kind of scrutiny. Business Insider has an article about some Twitter API data that someone collected and analyzed. Twitter boasts 175 million registered users, but according to their own measure of an “active user” (following at least 30 accounts with a third of those following back), the API data showed that less than 21 million Twitter accounts are active.

The data from the API also showed that 56 million Twitter users are following zero accounts, while 90 million users have zero followers.

I think it would be interesting if someone figured out how to sort by type of user – whether they’re essentially selling or buying. I think that if you were able to pull the sellers out of that pool of 21 million active users, you’d see a dwindling audience that is actually listening.

I’m not saying it’s useless. But it’s a tool, not a solution.