Measuring the amount and quality of traffic generated through Twitter can be challenging since most Twitter activity occurs outside of the web, on desktop clients like TweetDeck, mobile apps like Echofon, and other types of third party applications.
I’ve found six reports for Twitter client statistics from Many Eyes/IBM, TwitStat, Sysomos, Twalytics, Funkatron, and TweetStats, however there are some big differences among their reports. For example, web (twitter.com) usage varies from 18.9% to 48%; TweetDeck varies from 6.6% to 13.8%; and Hootsuite varies from 0.6% to 5.2%. That’s a lot of variation considering these reports were all generated on the same day (Feb 5, 2010) with the exception of the Sysomos report (Nov 16, 2009). Averaging the results among all six reports reduces the variances likely due to the different data collection methodologies.
