Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, with over 300 million active users logging in at least once a month. While many users know the basics about Twitter, such as its 280-character limit for tweets, there are many interesting facts which most people won’t have heard about before. Whether it’s staggering statistics or fun facts about how this social media platform was created, here are the top 10 facts about Twitter.

Approximately 350,000 Tweets are posted every minute.

• Every single minute, an average of 350,000 new tweets are posted on Twitter.
• This equates to more than 500 million tweets per day – that’s a lot of words!
• While it might seem like a large quantity, by comparison, Facebook has an average of 3 million new posts per minute.
• That’s almost 10 times as many as Twitter.

One of the original ideas for a name was “FriendStalker.”

• While Twitter definitely allows you to “stalk” friends and celebrities by scrolling through their posts and seeing what they’ve been talking about, it could have been a completely different brand had the name “FriendStalker” won in the end.
• The name had been suggested by Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter.
• Noah Glass, another co-founder, later began searching a dictionary for words similar to “Twitch” and came across Twitter.

According to the Vatican, you’re a better person if you follow the Pope on Twitter.

• The Vatican and the Catholic Church claim there are many things you can do to reduce your time spent in purgatory and become a better person.
• This includes helping others, giving to the poor, and saying daily prayers.
• However, in 2013, the Vatican announced that another way you can achieve this is by following the Pope and keeping up with live events such as the Catholic World Youth Day on Twitter.

The hashtag was first introduced in 2007.

• Chris Messina is the person responsible for introducing the famous hashtag into our digital world.
• Hashtags are designed to help users connect to a particular theme or topic, and they are often used during events and conferences to help people find posts about the same thing.
• At first, there were doubts around whether the hashtag would ever become popular with internet users since it appeared too technical and “nerdy.”
• However, as any user of social media knows, hashtags have now spilled out into Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and advertising materials worldwide.
• Chris Messina could have patented the idea of hashtags and made a large sum of money from it.
• However, he was more interested in ensuring that people could freely use it so the idea would catch on quickly.

The Library of Congress used to archive all tweets.

• America’s Library of Congress started archiving all tweets in 2010.
• However, in 2017 announced that it would start being more selective with the tweets that were archived.
• This decision was partly due to the increase in the number of tweets being posted.
• So the Library decided that it would retain only certain tweets for the interest and benefit of the American people.

The famous blue Twitter bird is called Larry.

• Even people who use Twitter on a regular basis may not know that the name of the blue bird is Larry.
• Although Twitter’s beginnings were back in 2006, Larry’s name wasn’t actually confirmed until early 2012.
• While people had questioned and speculated about whether Larry the bird had a name or not, it was confirmed in a tweet by Ryan Sarver, a Twitter manager.

Katy Perry has the most Twitter followers.

• Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, and Taylor Swift all boast millions of followers and are up there with the top 5 most popular Twitter accounts.
• But Katy Perry is the one who claims the crown as of 2019.
• Katy Perry joined Twitter in 2009, and as of 2019, has 107 million followers.
• However, many people have noted that a large percentage of celebrity followers are often fake accounts, and Justin Bieber’s following is only thought to be 50% real accounts.
• In addition to the issue of real and fake accounts, many users on Twitter who follow celebrities are not very active or have ceased to use Twitter completely.

The very first tweet was posted on March 21, 2006.

• Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s co-founders, was the first person to post anything to Twitter.
• Back in the day, the founders would refer to it as “twttr,” following the trend of the early 2000s in removing the vowels and shortening the word.
• Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet at 9:50 pm and it read, “just setting up my twttr.”
• The social network site wasn’t released to the public until July 15, 2006.

Twitter’s early days were not without their problems.

• In 2007, Twitter started to experience big growth, and its communications and media team would take advantage of popular conferences and events in order to maximize usage and get more people to sign up.
• During one conference in 2007, around 60,000 tweets per day were being posted on Twitter, which proved too much for the servers to handle at the time.
• The “Fail Whale” was the name given to the page which used to show on the screen when servers had been overloaded.
• It was a cartoon image of a whale being pulled out of water in a net by eight little birds – representative of Larry the Twitter bird.

Ellen DeGeneres is responsible for the most retweeted tweet of all time.

• In March 2014 at the Oscars, Ellen DeGeneres took a selfie which became the most retweeted tweet ever.
• This has been one of the objectives of the tweet when Ellen posted it, and it succeeded in gaining over three million retweets.
• The selfie included other celebrities Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and several other movie and TV stars.
• It has become one of the most iconic selfies of all time, as well as being a hugely popular tweet, and many people have sought to replicate it on social media with their own selfies.