Study Shows: 42% Of Tweets Come From Third Party Twitter Apps

Twitter users only send 58% of their overall Tweets using the company’s own proprietary Twitter applications and website according to a recent survey. The study comes just one week after platform chief Ryan Sarver’s said that 90% of all Twitter users are sending Tweets from official Twitter applications.

Sarver’s assertion may in fact be true, as much of Twitter’s activity is performed by a handful of heavy users, meaning 42% of all Tweets could in fact be coming from a much smaller group than the 90% of users who actively use Twitter apps.

Sysomos, the company behind the study found that of the 25 million tweets they sampled since the March 11 Twitter API was released, 42% came from non-official apps.

The company also broke down the percentage of major third-party apps with TweetDeck accounting for 5.5% of all sampled tweets with the following apps accounting for 13.1% of overall tweets: UberSocial, Echfone and UberMedia (the chart below shows use among third party apps, not among all Tweets across the network).

Regardless of the popularity found in third party apps, Twitter has told developers that they no longer want them to create Twitter clients, stating that a consistent user experience can only be achieved if the company has direct involvement in Twitter applications across all platforms (web, mobile, computers, etc.).

At this time Twitter doesn’t appear to be taking any drastic measures to eliminate third-party competitors, such as removing API privileges.