Twitter Bios

One of the easiest things to control on Twitter is your bio. And there's all sorts of advice out there about how to write the perfect one.

Naturally, your bio needs to be clear, catchy, and make you seem interesting. But are there any statistics that'll help you craft the perfect personal description? Glad you asked.

Download full report (33 pages)

Followers

Longer Twitter bios are best to attract followers.
Best length

On average, bios with exactly 91 characters have the most followers.
Popular length

Bios differ greatly in length, but the most popular is 160 characters - the maximum.
Location

London and Paris are the top locations users tag themselves in.

Twitter Bio Length

Twitter bios have a max length of 160 characters. Incredibly, our study found 3,684 users who've managed to exceed that number, going all the way up to 200. We ignored these users in this section because the sample size is too low to give us meaningful results.

As you can see in this graph, bio lengths tend to be all over the place.

The major thing to note, though, is the huge spike at the high end of this graph. Twitter limits the number of characters in your bio to 160. And of course, plenty of people aim to hit this limit exactly.

Users do this by including links and hashtags in their bios in order to make the most of this precious real estate.

Length of Twitter bios

Number of profiles

Does Average Bio Length Affect Follower Rates?

Growing a following is often a key goal for Twitter users. So naturally, it pays to know if there's a "perfect" length for a Twitter bio in order to achieve this goal.

As you can see in this graph, one particular bio length seems to stand out above the rest. Profiles with exactly 91 characters have on average 21775.56 followers, the highest rate in our study.

Average followers by length of bio

Number of followers

How Median Bio Length Affects Followers

When we take the median number of followers, we see something quite different. The median seems to indicate that the number of followers steadily increases, the longer a bio becomes.

This median number is likely more trustworthy than the average in the previous section, because it limits the effect of the biggest and smallest Twitter accounts. In this case, we would conclude that longer Twitter profiles tend to attract more followers.

Median followers by length of bio

Number of followers

Do Hashtags in Your Bio Bring More Followers?

If you're looking to build a bigger Twitter following, it makes sense that using hashtags in your bio would help. Hashtags make your content easier to find, so why wouldn't it be the same for your profile?

In fact, there's no evidence that this strategy helps whatsoever. By far the largest group of bios (by number of followers) are those with no hashtags, and the number of followers decreases as the number of hashtags increases.

Followers vs hashtags in Twitter bio

Number of followers

Twitter User Locations

Twitter now has more than 330 million monthly active users worldwide. According to Pew, it's also the 7th most used social network among US adults.

But of course the platform is now used internationally. To demonstrate this, we wanted to show the most common locations for Twitter users, as stated by the users themselves.

We took a subset of our database to create a representative sample. By far the biggest number actually left their location blank, so our results only reflect those who gave a location. Download full report (33 pages)

Top 10 Twitter locations

London

45,254
Paris

41,630
Los Angeles

19,958
New York

16,383
San Francisco

13,821
Istanbul

12,348
Barcelona

11,590
Chicago

11,336

Next chapter