182018 Twitter Report

Engagement—Median

Video posts have the highest overall engagement rate (38% higher than image posts).

—Nothing

Tweets with no hashtags, emojis, or handles have the highest average engagement.

—Retweets

The average tweet receives 1690.46 retweets.

—Engagements

The average tweets sees 1695.62 engagements (likes + RTs).

For social media marketers, engagement rate is a key metric to

monitor. This tells the poster how users respond to their content,

and especially whether or not they share it.

For this reason, high engagement rates are a prized possession,

and many marketers work hard for even small improvements. We

looked at average engagement rates on Twitter, and whether using

certain features improves them.

Engagement ✍

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EngagementTwitter users have access to a few basic features to make their posts more interesting. Hashtags let users similar tweets, handles let them tag other users directly, and emojis add tiny characters to a post.

Since one key reason users include these features in their posts is for engagement, we wanted to see if which ones actually help the most.

As you'll see in our section on hashtags, these seem to have a negative effect on engagement. And while, on average, posts with no extra features receive the most engagements, emojis and handles don't appear to overly affect engagement rates for the worse.

Does using hashtags, emojis, or handles help most?

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15k

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!@ # Nothing

Type of post

Average engagements

Average engagements VS Post feature

Average Engagemenents

Hashtags Hashtags are now ubiquitous on social networks including

Instagram and Facebook, but they began life on Twitter. The goal

was to group tweets about a similar topic together, to help people

find more content on topics of interest.

It's clear that hashtags have caught on. But are they useful for

Twitter marketers? And do they increase engagement on the social

network?

Hashtags !

—Most engaging

5 of the 10 most engaging hashtags in 2017 were about one South Korean boy band.

—Most popular

The most popular Twitter hashtags: #giveaway #quote #win #marketing #travel.

—Usage

Nearly 40% of tweets contain a hashtag.

—Engagement

In general, hashtags do not increase Twitter engagement.

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Hashtags Hashtags are incredibly popular. Nearly 40% of all tweets contain at least one. And since around 500 million tweets are sent each day, that adds up to almost 200 million tweets per day including a hashtag.

And yet, the vast majority of tweets contain no hashtags at all. These are likely one-off posts that don't belong in a group, or the users who post them prefer not to have their tweets grouped with others.

Hashtag use#2

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Frequency

Hashtags usedFrequency

Hashtags For Twitter marketers, hashtags are seen as a valuable tool. It makes sense that by grouping your posts with others, your posts become easier to find. And the easier they are to find, the more likely it is that people will like, retweet, or reply.

But as you can see, using hashtags does not appear to increase Twitter engagement. In fact, the median number of engagements goes down with each hashtag added.

Note: We've used the median to mitigate the effects of very large Twitter accounts that may not use hashtags. If we use the average, the results are even more stark.

Hashtag engagements

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Engagement Median

Median engagements VS Hastahgs used

Engagement Median

Hashtags Not all hashtags are equal. Some hashtags are used at an astonishingly high rate, while most are either too niche to be common, or are simply jokes.

Here are the most common hashtags in our database for 2017. Social media marketers will likely want to steer clear of these, as are too crowded to be used effectively.

Top hashtags 2017#4

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1M

#travel

#marketing

#giveaway

#win

#quote

#art #R

T

#startup

#socialmedia

Most popular hashtags 2017

Frequency

Hashtags Some hashtags seem to engender more engagements (likes and retweets) than others. So which were the most engaging hashtags in 2017?

Incredibly, the top four hashtags all relate to South Korean pop group BTS. The group's singles Love Yourself and DNA both made our list, as did group member Jimin. Another South Korean pop band, EXO, also features on this list. This shows how passionate and engaged this fanbase is.

#LOVE_YOURSELF appears in our database around 26,000 times, with an average rate of nearly 99,000 engagements per tweet!

Most engaging hashtags 2017

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#Love_Yours…

#JIMIN

#BTS

#DNA

#TheLastJedi

#iPhoneX

#POTUS

#SolarEclip…

#EXO

Most engaging hashtags 2017

Engagement AVG

Users TaggedSince the beginning, Twitter has allowed users to tag others in

tweets by using the "@" symbol. This lets them include more people

in conversations, and alert others to topics of interest.

So do Twitter users make the most of this function?

Users Tagged !

—Engagement

Tagging other users does not significantly increase engagement.

—Frequency

68% of tweets do not tag other users.

—Old limit

Twitter previously limited users tagged to 10.

—New limit

With the increased character count, this limit has also increased.

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Users TaggedThe vast majority of tweets (68%) do not tag other users (by using their "@" handle). This is not surprising - tagging others can be annoying and may lead to users being blocked.

The number of tagged users drops steadily until it reaches 10, where there is a slight jump (not visible in our graph). This is explained in the next section.

Note: We've removed retweets from these figures. We'll see whether tagging users increases engagements shortly.

Users tagged in tweets

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Number of users tagged per post

Frequency

NB Handles

Frequency

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Users TaggedIn short, the answer is no. Our Instagram Report found that tagging others was the most effective way to increase engagement. On Twitter, it doesn't appear to improve engagement rates at all.

See that spike at 10? Since 2014, Twitter users have had the ability to tag up to 10 other users in their tweets. And we see a significant spike in median engagement when a user tags 10 others.

In 2017, Twitter increased its 140 character limit, which also increased the number of users a person could tag. In future reports, we expect to see this spike at 10 decrease as a result.

Does tagging users increase engagement?

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Engagement Average VS NB handles

Engagement AVG

NB Handles

Frequency

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Twitter BiosOne of the easiest things to control on Twitter is your bio. And

there's all sorts of advice out there about how to write the perfect

one.

Naturally, your bio needs to be clear, catchy, and make you seem

interesting. But are there any statistics that'll help you craft the

perfect personal description? Glad you asked.

Twitter Bios !

—Followers

Longer Twitter bios are best to attract followers.

—Best length

On average, bios with exactly 91 characters have the most followers.

—Popular length

Bios differ greatly in length, but the most popular is 160 characters - the maximum.

—Location

London and Paris are the top locations users tag themselves in.

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Twitter BiosTwitter bios have a max length of 160 characters. Incredibly, our study found 3,684 users who've managed to exceed that number, going all the way up to 200. We ignored these users in this section because the sample size is too low to give us meaningful results.

As you can see in this graph, bio lengths tend to be all over the place.

The major thing to note, though, is the huge spike at the high end of this graph. Twitter limits the number of characters in your bio to 160. And of course, plenty of people aim to hit this limit exactly.

Users do this by including links and hashtags in their bios in order to make the most of this precious real estate.

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Length of Twitter biosMedian Likes

Description Length

Frequency

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Twitter BiosGrowing a following is often a key goal for Twitter users. So naturally, it pays to know if there's a "perfect" length for a Twitter bio in order to achieve this goal.

As you can see in this graph, one particular bio length seems to stand out above the rest. Profiles with exactly 91 characters have on average 21775.56 followers, the highest rate in our study.

Does average bio length affect follower rates?

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Average followers by bio length

Followers

Description Length

User Followers Count AVG

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Twitter BiosGrowing a following is often a key goal for Twitter users. So naturally, it pays to know if there's a "perfect" length for a Twitter bio in order to achieve this goal.

As you can see in this graph, one particular bio length seems to stand out above the rest. Profiles with exactly 91 characters have on average 21775.56 followers, the highest rate in our study.

Does average bio length affect follower rates?

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Median followers based on bio length

Followers

Description Length

User Followers Count Median

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Twitter BiosIf you're looking to build a bigger Twitter following, it makes sense that using hashtags in your bio would help. Hashtags make your content easier to find, so why wouldn't it be the same for your profile?

In fact, there's no evidence that this strategy helps whatsoever. By far the largest group of bios (by number of followers) are those with no hashtags, and the number of followers decreases as the number of hashtags increases.

Do hashtags in your bio bring more followers

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Engagement Median

Median followers per number of hashtags in bio

Engagement Median

Twitter BiosTwitter now has more than 330 million monthly active users worldwide. According to Pew, it's also the 7th most used social network among US adults.

But of course the platform is now used internationally. To demonstrate this, we wanted to show the most common locations for Twitter users, as stated by the users themselves.

We took a subset of our database to create a representative sample. By far the biggest number actually left their location blank, so our results only reflect those who gave a location. (Note: it's up to the user, so we see both cities and countries tagged).

Twitter user locations

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Top 8 Locations

London 28,718

Paris 25,172

United States 25,159

France 23,284

Logs Angeles, CA 19,958

Chicago, IL 18,719

México 16,784

London, England 16,536

Paris, France 16,458

EmojisEmojis have been around since 1999, when they were first

introduced for Japanese mobile phone users. They've since

become adopted on virtually every social network, including

Twitter.

We took a closer look at the emojis in our database to find out how

people are using them, which emojis have the highest engagement

rates, and which were most popular.

Emojis !

—Most popular

The three most popular emojis are "

❤

$

—Top engagement

The emojis with the highest average engagement are

%

&

'

—Animals

The most popular animal emojis are (

)

*

—Engagement

Emojis are more effective at increasing engagement rates than hashtags.

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EmojisTo those paying attention, it will be no surprise that "Face with Tears of Joy" is the most popular emoji on Twitter. In fact, this emoji is so popular that Oxford Dictionaries named it word of the year in 2015. Not just the best emoji; the best word.

The others on this list are also not particularly surprising. Perhaps more of a shock is that a simple smiley face (

!

) ranks 132nd, while the open-mouthed smile (

"

) - the first emoji on most lists - was 32nd.

Most popular Twitter emojis

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# ❤ % & ' ( ) * + ,

Emoji

Number of posts

Number of posts VS Emoji

Number of posts

EmojisBrands and marketers use emojis to try to catch other users' attention, and hopefully get more likes and retweets. The bright little icons should make it more likely that people who see them react.

As we saw with hashtags and handles, the largest group for engagement rates is those tweets containing no emojis. But unlike those other examples, as the number of emojis increases, the engagement rate becomes less predictable.

Based on this data, one could argue that using 11, 12, or 15 emojis would be better than 1, 2, or 3. Although it should be noted that the sample size is smaller once we pass 10 emojis.

Do emojis affect engagement rates?

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Number of Emojis

Average Engagements

Average engagements VS Number of Emojis

Average Engagements

EmojisBrands and marketers use emojis to try to catch other users' attention, and hopefully get more likes and retweets. The bright little icons should make it more likely that people who see them react.

As we saw with hashtags and handles, the largest group for engagement rates is those tweets containing no emojis. But unlike those other examples, as the number of emojis increases, the engagement rate becomes less predictable.

Based on this data, one could argue that using 11, 12, or 15 emojis would be better than 1, 2, or 3. Although it should be noted that the sample size is smaller once we pass 10 emojis.

Most engaging Twitter Emojis

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! " # $ % ⚰ ' ( ➿ * + ☠

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Average Engagements

Average engagements VS Emoji

Average Engagements

EmojisThis graph is really just for fun. It's based on simple question: are some emojis preferred by Twitter users with a higher average number of followers?

Or to put it another way: which emojis are correlated with users with the most followers? There's not much to take away from this graph - it's just a bit of fun.

Which emojis do the biggest users prefer?

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➵! " ⏸ $ % & ' ( )

Emoji

Average Followers

Average followers vs Emoji

Average Followers

EmojisAnother fun one. People love cute animal content on social media, and emojis are no different. So which animal emojis are the most popular on Twitter?

Dogs and monkeys are always popular animals, and both feature in our top three. Some emojis - like the goat and the snake - may be used to represent other ideas. Goat is commonly used in sports to mean either a person who makes a mistake, or "greatest of all time" (G.O.A.T.), which the snake usually refers to a treacherous or untrustworthy person.

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Number of posts

Number of posts VS Animal Emoji

Average Followers

Verified AccoIn 2009, Twitter introduced a blue check mark to indicate that a

profile is "verified." This mark shows other Twitter users that this

account genuinely belongs to the person whose name it's in, and

not to a parody account or troll.

The feature was introduced following a lawsuit from St Louis

Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, after he was impersonated on

the platform.

The check mark is a Twitter status symbol, and one that marketers

and brands seek to attain. So do verified accounts have more

followers? And do their posts receive higher engagement rates?

Verified Accounts

—Followers

Verified accounts have more followers on average.

—Engagement

Verified accounts see more engagement on average.

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Verified AccoVerified users in our study

Verified users in this range 17.14%

Unverified users in this range 82.86%

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There are roughly 294,000 verified Twitter accounts. Naturally, most are going to be brands, influencers, or celebrities with a decent-sized following.

There's a clear, relatively simple process to become verified on Twitter. And most brands or influencers who take the platform seriously will naturally go through this process.

So what percentage of users between 10,000 and 100,000 followers are verified?

How Many Verified Twitter Accounts Exist?

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Verified AccoFollowers for verified accounts

Average followers for verified accounts 24370.63

Average followers for unverified accounts 20531.64

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This is potentially a strange question, because verified accounts almost always belong to well-known people and brands.

If we take a large sample of users of between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, do those with verified accounts tend to have more followers?

Do Verified Accounts Generally Have More Followers?

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Verified AccoEngagement rates

Average engagements for verified accounts 865.99

Average engagements for unverified accounts 676.98

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A verified account indicates to a Twitter user's followers that this account is legitimate. Many marketers would expect this to lead to higher engagement rates as a result.

To judge this, we only looked at accounts with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. As you can see, verified accounts in this range receive substantially more engagements, on average.

Engagement Rates for Verified Accounts

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Verified AccoMedian engagement rates

Median engagements for verified accounts 6

Median engagements for unverified accounts 2

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Again, we want to minimize the effect of a small number of highly successful tweets on our overall engagement rates. When we take the median engagement rate for posts from verified accounts, we still see considerably better results.

You'll notice again that the median number is drastically lower than the average. We continue to see that a huge proportion of tweets receive no engagements at all. This even applies to users with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.

Median Engagement Rates for Verified Accounts

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PeriscopeTwitter, like most other major social networks, has pushed to make

live video a feature of its platform. To do this, it acquired Periscope

in January 2015, and incorporated it into the network in March of

that year.

Now, Periscope lets marketers and Twitter users of all kinds create

live video through their Twitter accounts. For many, the ability to

broadcast live presents an exciting opportunity - especially for

brands trying to make a real-time connection.

So do Periscope videos engage users at a higher rate than regular

tweets?

Periscope !

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PeriscopeAverage and median engagement rates

Average number of engagements 781.166879

Median number of engagements 42

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Video is widely seen as being more engaging than ordinary social media content. It makes sense that live video should drastically increase engagement rates, since it's happening live. But Periscope is free and open to everyone, including those with small followings and no video marketing expertise. It may be this that causes average engagement rates to be in fact lower than ordinary tweets.

However, the median number of engagement is substantially higher for Periscope videos. This likely indicates that the ordinary Periscope user in fact creates a better quality of content, but that Periscope videos rarely attract the high numbers of engagements seen by some tweets.

Periscope Engagement Rates

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PeriscopeAverage number of retweets (Periscope) 726.98

Average number of retweets (all) 1690.46

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To go deeper into engagements, let's look specifically at retweets. We see that the average number of retweets for Periscope videos is actually lower than the number of retweets for all posts. We should remember that averages can be skewed heavily by posts at the extremes. When a tweet from a global celebrity is retweeted millions of times, it increases the average for all posts. Not one of the top 30 tweets of all time involves Periscope. And it's unlikely that Periscope videos will reach the same level of virality as any of these leading tweets.

Periscope Retweet Rates

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Other TwitterOther Twitter Facts & Figures

!

—Swear words

1 in 13 tweets contains a curse word. (Spinfold)

—Fake users

As of 2016, almost 50% of Justin Bieber's followers were fake. (Mashable)

—Black Panther

As of April 2018, Black Panther is already the most tweeted-about movie ever. (Twitter)

—Suspended accounts

Twitter has suspended 935,000+ accounts for terror-related reasons. (Engadget)

—Response times

60% of users expect a brand to respond to queries within an hour. (Twitter)

—Brands

The average Twitter user follows five brands. (Lori Taylor)

—Weekends

Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends. (Huffington Post)

—Top countries

5 countries account for 50% of all tweets. (Statista)

—Higher education

28% of Americans with a college degree use Twitter. (Hootsuite)

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Other TwitterHighlights of this report

Average retweets 1690.46

Periscope videos do no increase engagements

Average engagements for verified users 865.99

Bio length for most followers (characters) 91

Tweets that tag others 32%

Hashtags do no increase engagements

Tweets containing a hashtag 39.24%

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Despite concerns about its long-term future, Twitter remains an essential social media platform in 2018. Big brand announcements, customer interactions, and even international policymaking - it all happens on Twitter.

This is also where news breaks. 74% of users are on Twitter specifically for the news, including 11% of all U.S. adults. To be truly connected in 2018, you need to keep a close eye on this social network.

So what works for Twitter marketing in 2018? How do people use the platform, and which strategies make the biggest impact? We looked at more than 700 million tweets to see how people are using it, and what's working for them.

Enjoy the results.

Methodology for Our Twitter Report

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