According to Twitter, around 500 million tweets were sent each day in August 2015. The average tweet has been estimated to be between 40 and 60 characters in length, even though Twitter allows for a maximum of 140 characters. Assuming that the average tweet contains six words, that would mean that about 3 billion words are sent out on Twitter every day -- equivalent to more than 5,300 copies of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.
In just a few short years, Twitter's onslaught has expanded from 5,000 tweets a day in 2007 to today's mind-blowing millions of tweets. However, quantity doesn't always mean quality. A San Antonio-based market research company analyzed tweets in August 2009 and determined that 40% of the tweets sent were "pointless babble," followed by 38% that the firm labeled as "conversational."
More about Twitter:
- The social network was initially conceived as "stat.us" and later changed to "Twttr" when the prototype hit the airwaves in March 2006.
- Whose Twitter accounts had the most followers in September 2015? Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama.
- A star-studded selfie orchestrated by Ellen DeGeneres at the Academy Awards became a re-tweeting sensation in March 2014.