Almost half of the 974 million Twitter accounts may be fake

Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) may claim to have 241 million active monthly users, but how many of them are actually Tweeting? In a new report released by Twocharts, the website that tracks Twitter account activity, states that around 44% of the 974 million registered accounts have never sent a single Tweet.

This discrepancy between Twitters figures and Twocharts is caused by the different method of defining an active user. Twitters monthly activity is calculated by the number of users who log into their account at least once a month whereas Twocharts tracks actual number of Tweets by user.

Both standards of measurement make sense as there is no requirement to Tweet in order to find Twitter a useful app as you can find all kinds of interesting information without contributing to it. But it should still be a worrying statistic for Twitter as the main selling point of the app is that people participate in Tweeting and offer their views, facts and nowadays photos to each topic.

From a financial standpoint it is not great news for Twitter as a large amount of its monthly advertising revenue is generated from people taking action on their Twitter account with re-Tweets and favorites. There is no data available yet on whether the recent changes implemented by Twitter of including photos, photo tags and enlarged popular tweets will make a difference to the Twocharts data over time.

Twitter refused to comment on the report’s findings as it is not their own data. But, there is still a discrepancy somewhere, because if out of 974 million registered accounts only 241 million logged in last month, what are the rest of them doing?