Verified Accounts

In 2009, Twitter introduced a blue check mark to indicate that a profile is "verified." This mark shows other Twitter users that this account genuinely belongs to the person whose name it's in, and not to a parody account or troll.

The feature was introduced following a lawsuit from St Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, after he was impersonated on the platform.

The check mark is a Twitter status symbol, and one that marketers and brands seek to attain. So do verified accounts have more followers? And do their posts receive higher engagement rates?

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Followers

Verified accounts have more followers on average.
Engagement

Verified accounts see more engagement on average.

How Many Verified Twitter Accounts Exist?

There are roughly 294,000 verified Twitter accounts. Naturally, most are going to be brands, influencers, or celebrities with a decent-sized following.

There's a clear, relatively simple process to become verified on Twitter. And most brands or influencers who take the platform seriously will naturally go through this process.

So what percentage of users between 10,000 and 100,000 followers are verified?

Verified users in our study

Verified users in this range

17.14%
Unverified users in this range

82.86%

Do Verified Accounts Generally Have More Followers?

This is potentially a strange question, because verified accounts almost always belong to well-known people and brands.

If we take a large sample of users of between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, do those with verified accounts tend to have more followers?

Followers for verified accounts

Average followers for verified accounts

24370.63
Average followers for unverified accounts

20531.64

Engagement Rates for Verified Accounts

A verified account indicates to a Twitter user's followers that this account is legitimate. Many marketers would expect this to lead to higher engagement rates as a result.

To judge this, we only looked at accounts with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. As you can see, verified accounts in this range receive substantially more engagements, on average.

Engagement rates

Average engagements for verified accounts

865.99
Average engagements for unverified accounts

676.98

Median Engagement Rates for Verified Accounts

Again, we want to minimize the effect of a small number of highly successful tweets on our overall engagement rates. When we take the median engagement rate for posts from verified accounts, we still see considerably better results.

You'll notice again that the median number is drastically lower than the average. We continue to see that a huge proportion of tweets receive no engagements at all. This even applies to users with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. Download full report (33 pages)

Median engagement rates

Median engagements for verified accounts

6
Median engagements for unverified accounts

2

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