According to the Conversational Media summit in NY, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo is putting out some stats on Twitter usage, unique visitors and more importantly the preferred user experience that Twitter is seeing.

These latest number from Costolo confirms again that SiliconANGLE had the right angle on the meaning of Twitter.  However, there is a deeper meaning and if you’re into social media then you should read my angle below.

From Techcrunch who is reporting on the event:

Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrast, estimated 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May, see chart below). Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.

My Angle On Twitter Data – It’s Not About Monitoring But Action and Influence

The comments from Dick Costolo confirms what we wrote months ago about the active users make up about 20% of the main value of Twitter.   At the moment Twitter is not for the mainstream users, but instead it’s for a new class of user or active users.

The Twitter’s user data speaks to the behavior of those new users. The Twitter user base seems to follow the classic 80/20 rule in terms of activity driving value – 20% of the user provide 80% of the value.

Note to Twitter execs and developers -  this highlights that Twitter should pay even more attention to their core tweeting community because it is those individuals who make up the Twitter value.

Social Media Impact For Brands

That being said the search and discovery value of twitter is valuable to the mainstream user. This is why the overall Comscore Twitter user numbers are different than Twitter’s registered user numbers. Most users are generally lazy and want things done for them. That is why users browse and search Twitter data. Active Twitter users are "proxies" for lazy mainstream users which is pretty much everyone.

Mainstream people are trying to figure out the value of Twitter. Twitter’s value is in the resulting data from interactions of these early adopters or "proxies" that drive "action" within distinct user groups. Action is the result of the engagement data or interaction data among users. These results cause users to take an action on something. Action meaning avoid, ignore, comment, retweet, buy, sell, share, and/or some other thing that is important for the user.

Although Twitter is noisy, there is big time signal in those tweets.  Twitter rewards real time interaction and curation which translates into discovery which tranlates into loyalty. So even though not everyone tweets everyone can benefit from the select that are tweeting.

With Twitter the 80/20 rule applies. This is a marketplace developing and it’s untapped.

Twitter Is One Big Ant Colony

The classic saying goes an ant by itself is weak but a colony of ants can do great things. I’ve always said Twitter is like one "big ant colony" – in that there is lots of signaling (among ants). By themselves the signals (tweets) look noisy and irrelevant, but when taking those tweets in context to a distinct user group (ant colony) in aggregation these self formed groups can move mountains from changing government and helping earthquake victims to unearthing bad products and services.

This new class of user is disrupting the marketplace.

This is an opportunity for brands and services to target this new class of user can achieve new market share and positions. It’s social media. Harnessing the signal from the noise is one of the biggest opportunities on the web today. This translates to social networks, cloud, and mobile. Its about the users, interactions, and action.

I’ve blogged recently out my mobile innovation cycle and that same model applies here with social data. It’s about the interaction data and what that enables.

Bottom Line: With the always on connected Internet early adopters and influential users have more power than ever before.

What’s even more exciting is that the notion of influence is changing. The Internet, social networks, Twitter, Facebook, and social media have globalized and opened up influence to the masses.