expertSEM

Updated with answer on November 23, 2009.

This week’s question comes to us from Lorrin Nahinu, our SEO and analytics technician. Lorrin asks, What is the current average number of tweets sent out each hour? Select a multiple choice answer below and leave your pick in the comments. And no cheating, now. We know you can simply Google the answer, but we hope that you won’t!

A. 800,000

B. 1,100,000

C. 1,400,000

D. 1,700,000

Check back next week for the answer.

Answer: B. 1,100,000.

This information comes from Pingdom. The company developed an application to track the number of tweets sent on Twitter. They measured the Twittoshere for three weeks (Oct. 21 – Nov. 11) and found some interesting data:

• Average tweets per day: more than 27.3 million
• Average tweets per hour: 1,138,772
• Tweets per hour varies significantly depending on time of day (see chart below)
• Twitter activity coincides with major sports and entertainment events (e.g., sports events, TV shows, etc.)
• Activity is higher on weekdays, with Monday and Tuesday being the most active days
• Americans are most active on Twitter (night hours in United States cause significant drop in tweets/hour

I’m wondering how accurate this data is considering they only measured Twitter. Did they take into account people tweeting from TweetDeck, Twitterfic, Tweetie, etc.? How does activity differ when tweeting from an iPhone or Blackberry? Their blog post about this data does not address this issue. Still, it’s interesting to see the numbers and I believe their conclusions (people tweet at work, single events can have big effect on activity, Americans are most active) are quite accurate.