There has been a lot of talk recently about how bots and automated programs are having a major effect on the marketing and advertising industries. According to the latest Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) report from Twitter, however, bots are very active on their social network as well. According to the filing, about 8.5% of Twitter’s 255 million actively engaged members (those who post at least once per month) are actually bots.
That means about 23 million Twitter accounts are posting, retweeting and favoriting, even though they aren’t real people. This is a two edged sword since in many cases the bots are not necessarily a bad thing. Some accounts are well known to be bots, and people follow them because they like the service they provide.
Some marketers have bots that automatically post content that they publish from a variety of sources. While it is technically published by a bot, it is valuable content that is made by real people (in most cases).
On the other hand, however, some bots are not helpful at all. They can be set up to try to artificially increase the number of followers an account has or otherwise boost the popularity of certain activities on Twitter
Whether you think it is a good thing or a bad thing, however, it is interesting to know just how much of Twitter is actually bots. You can read the actual SEC filing from Twitter HERE if you are interested in seeing these statistics and learning more about Twitter in general.
