Does Social Media Twitter Have Half a Billion Users?

Basically Twitter is a wonderful micro-blogging website as like as Facebook. Has Social Media Twitter really reach 500 million users, as new research states or is the company drowning in fake accounts?

The reason of its problem with bots and spam accounts — such as the thousands that have started following Mitt Romneyin the last few weeks. Twitter tends to be very careful because when it comes to announcing user numbers. The company appears to have a policy of only discussing the number of active users. 

Now Back in September 2011, CEO Dick Costolo said there were 100 million active users who log in Twitter at least once a month, while 50 million logs in every day while State of the Union-style talk at Twitter headquarters. On the company’s sixth birthday back in March this year, it announced the number of active users had reached 140 million though it didn’t clear its real users whether per day logins or not that was monthly logins.

Semiocast- a Paris-based data analysis company, claims that Twitter reached the 500 million accounts mark in June 2012, including more than 140 million in the U.S. market.

Semiocast doesn’t discuss what the difference between active and inactive users is. If you do the math, however, & it may have just carelessly revealed that the company has 360 million accounts either don’t log in every month respectively, or don’t exist in the first place as well.

If that’s the case, then fake users on Twitter may outnumber the real thing by ratio more than 2 to 1. 

The problem is that, as data analysis firms such as Topsy have told in the past, we can’t really get a definitive answer on this topic. Even the world’s smartest computer scientists can’t make out the difference between someone trying Twitter a few times & then dropping it after a long time, and accounts created by spammers or others with malicious intent. 

Semiocast is now able to provide some more definitive (specific geographic) data when it looks at the locations added to tweets. Do you know what city in the world tends to tweet the most? Exactly not. You may be surprised to hear that Jakarta, capital of Indonesia tweets the most rather than any other city.

Now, let us know what you think. Where does the actual number of Twitter users actually lie? Share with us in comment.