How many of your Twitter followers are dead?

This question occurred to me recently. I started to do some calculations and what I found is a bit creepy.

I have a little over 7,300 followers on Twitter. I have been active on the site since 2009 so that's roughly 4 years. If we assume that there has been a fairly steady rise then in each of the years I have been active I have had an average of around 3,650 followers in each of those years.

In the UK in 2011 there was a mortality rate of 0.623%. So if we use that as the standard rate for each year that means that on average in each of the years I have been active on Twitter we would expect just under 23 of my followers to die. Over the 4 years it would be 91.*

I expect some of the accounts of the deceased are closed down but as we know there are problems with this and it requires surviving relatives to be quite on the digital ball which often they are not. They have after all more important things to worry about! So if I assume that half of those accounts will have been closed down (which I think is generous) that still leaves 45 of my followers that are likely to have passed away. And of course those with more followers than me and/or those who have been on Twitter for longer will likely have even more followers who are in reality no longer with us.

If you are alive and want to follow me on Twitter you can do so here: Follow @MarkReckons


*I am of course making a few assumptions here regarding the maths and also assuming all my followers are from the UK and distributed evenly across the age ranges. If anything a more detailed analysis would probably find the figure of 42 is something of an underestimate. Oh and I am also assuming that all of my followers were real people in the first place rather than automated accounts or spambots. These things probably balance each other out though.