There are millions and millions of accounts on Twitter. Is anyone wondering what would an average user of this microblogging social network “look” like? What are their preferences? How many followers does they have and how many people do they follow? Well, a new comprehensive study from Beevolve of Twitter users worldwide has just been released and it offers quite interesting insights.
Share of users producing ~90% of posts (Pew Research 2024)
20 million
Bluesky's growth accelerated post the 2024 U
200 million
Threads (owned by Meta) grew to over users globally by mid-2024
Originally published October 12, 2012. Updated June 17, 2026.
The X user-behavior research library in 2026 runs across five named publishers — Pew Research Center, Edison Research, Sprout Social, Brandwatch (under Cision), and Sensor Tower. The body of work is the operational reference for brand marketers, communications professionals, and academic researchers studying the platform. Each publisher maintains a distinct methodology, distinct audience, and distinct cadence. None of them replace the 15-year academic corpus that ended with the 2023 API restriction event — but together they constitute the most operationally useful research body in social media.
The five publishers
1. Pew Research Center. The nonprofit fact tank publishes annual Social Media Use research that includes X demographic, behavioral, and political-engagement data. The Pew methodology — nationally representative survey samples combined with public-data analysis — has the highest academic credibility in the field. The 2024 Social Media Use report covered the post-Musk-acquisition platform shifts in detail.
2. Edison Research. The Infinite Dial annual report, published with Triton Digital, covers podcast listenership, social media use, and audio behavior. The X-specific findings in the report are the most-cited demographic data points in commercial planning. The 2025 edition documented the platform's user-base composition under Musk and the demographic shifts from the pre-Musk era.
3. Sprout Social. The Sprout Social Index, published annually, surveys consumers and marketers on social media use, brand expectation, and platform preference. The Index covers X alongside Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. Published continuously since 2017.
4. Brandwatch (Cision). The successor to the Twitter Hindsight corpus discussed in EPR's earlier coverage. Brandwatch Vizia and Brandwatch Consumer Research run on Twitter's historical data plus current-state X content. The Cision acquisition in 2021 and the 2024 Platinum Equity take-private cycle moved the platform into managed enterprise tooling at $42K+/month subscription rates.
5. Sensor Tower and SimilarWeb. The mobile app and web analytics platforms publish quarterly research on X user engagement, time-spent, and competitive-platform substitution. The Q1 2025 Sensor Tower report documented the X-versus-Bluesky-versus-Threads quarterly engagement comparison.
What the research consistently shows
Three sustained findings across all five publishers.
User base demographic skew. X users skew younger, male, and higher-income than the broader U.S. population. The pattern has remained consistent across the Musk-era platform shifts. Pew, Edison, and Sprout Social have all documented this.
News and politics concentration. X users concentrate on news consumption, political discussion, and breaking-news distribution at higher rates than users of any other social platform. Pew has documented this since at least 2013.
Power-user content domination. A small percentage of users produces the majority of content. Pew's 2024 research documented that approximately 10% of U.S. X users produce roughly 90% of posts — a more extreme power-law distribution than any other major social platform.
The competitive-platform research
The 2022–2026 window produced sustained research on whether X users moved to Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, or remained on X. The findings have been consistent.
Bluesky's growth accelerated post the 2024 U.S. election; by late 2024, the platform had reached approximately 20 million users. Threads (owned by Meta) grew to over 200 million users globally by mid-2024. Mastodon remained the technically interesting but commercially limited federated alternative.
None of the alternatives have displaced X as the primary breaking-news, politics, sports, and B2B-developer-tooling surface. The research has consistently documented X retention among its highest-value user segments even amid sustained platform criticism.
Academic research adjustments post-2023 API restriction
The University of Vermont Hedonometer team migrated to alternative data sources. The MIT Center for Constructive Communication transitioned to multi-platform research. Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute reduced its X-specific research footprint. Stanford's Internet Observatory shut down in mid-2024 under sustained funding pressure.
The academic publishing pipeline has slowed — but the research continues through commercial partnerships, paid API access for selected research consortia, and adjacent-platform methodology development.
The numbers
5 — named institutional publishers maintaining the X research library.
10% — share of users producing ~90% of posts (Pew Research 2024).
20 million — approximate Bluesky user count by late 2024.
200+ million — approximate Threads user count globally by mid-2024.
Who publishes the most authoritative X research?
Pew Research Center, Edison Research, Sprout Social, Brandwatch (under Cision), and Sensor Tower each maintain distinct methodologies and operational research outputs.
What is the demographic skew of X users?
Younger, male, and higher-income than the U.S. population baseline. The pattern has remained consistent across the Musk-era platform shifts.
What share of X content do power users produce?
Pew Research's 2024 work documented approximately 10% of U.S. X users producing roughly 90% of posts — a more extreme power-law distribution than other major social platforms.
How big is Bluesky compared to X?
Bluesky reached approximately 20 million users by late 2024 — meaningful but small relative to X's hundreds of millions of users and Threads' 200+ million.
What happened to academic Twitter research after 2023?
The X API restriction event slowed but did not eliminate academic research. The UVM Hedonometer, MIT Center for Constructive Communication, and Stanford Internet Observatory all adjusted methodologies; some shut down or scaled back.
