How many people to produce 700K tweets

How many people does it take to produce 700,000 messages posted to Twitter?

Aside from the Republican and Democratic conventions the largest number of Twitter messages posted in the presidential election campaign so far was 736,187. That was September 12. Late the day before U.S. embassies were attacked in Egypt and Libya. And Romney said:

"It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

On the 12th it became clear that Mr. Romney's attack was mistaken, and that, along with other elements of the event, produced a stir. A 700K stir on Twitter.

So this is, at this point, a high point for the campaign. We know the number of tweets, but how many people wrote messages they posted to Twitter? What is the size of a one day 'crowd' on Twitter?

The searches used search terms: barackobama, obama, obama2012, romney, and mittromney. That found 402,953 messages including one of the Obama search terms and 333,234 messages mentioning one of the Romney search terms. The software requests Twitter messages containing the search term every five minutes. There are times when the volume of tweets is so high that it exceeds the 1,500 every five minutes Twitter permits. There was no sudden burst during the 12th so I believe this is a reasonably complete record of messages posted with these search terms.

I then sorted by username and counted. These are user accounts since some of the posts were done in the name of institutions rather than individual persons. I have not tried to divide the two.

The 402,953 messages referring to Obama were produced by 187,364 user accounts. That is 2.1 messages posted per account. Most people did not post two messages. The number posting only one tweet was 123,629 or 66% of the accounts posting. The most posts in a single day were 399 by ProObama2012 and 385 Obama2012LEGGO. Neither is a Twitter account. These are messages posted to the stream without going through Twitter.

The Romney 333,234 messages were produced by 131,171 user accounts for 2.5 posts per account. Posting only a single tweet were 85,282 users, which is also two-thirds of the users posting. The two accounts posting the most messages were ProLiveDesign with 310 and Obama2012LEGGO. Obama2012LEGGO is the same not Twitter account posting the second most messages mentioning Obama. But ProLiveDesign is a design firm, and they were posting messages to Twitter to sell their campaign tee shirts.

Three hundred and eleven thousand is a big number. It is a big crowd posting about the events of the campaign on a single day. There are many other people posting messages to Twitter about other subjects. The US presidential election is not the only politics around. But it can be useful as a baseline. There is now a framework for thinking about sixty thousand people posting a message about the anniversary of the occupy movement, for example, which happened on September 17, 2012.

How big is big? 310,993 is the biggest single just plain old day in the campaign so far. That's big.