Twitter is 10 years old. From the first tweet by co-founder Jack Dorsey on 22 March 2006 ("just setting up my twttr") it has grown into one of the biggest social media platforms. Twitter now earns around US$2.2 billion a year and has about 305 million monthly active users.

Katy Perry is the most-followed individual on the planet, with 86,910,797 followers at last count. She's well ahead of Justin Bieber (just 76 million or so), Taylor Swift, Barack Obama and YouTube. Perry herself follows just 159 people but has managed to send out 6,873 tweets between songs.

Whether Twitter is really anything more than the random sometimes interesting, sometimes banal 140-character thoughts of its users is a moot point. "The five percent talking to the five percent" is a phrase which has been used. In April 2014 PC Magazine noted that around 44% of user accounts had never tweeted.

Twitter is seen as a great way of alerting a target audience to news and information. However, when social analytics company Parse.ly analysed 200 of its client websites in January 2016 it found that Twitter generated just 1.5% of traffic for typical news organisations. The average publisher got 8 tweets per post, 3 clicks per tweet and 0.7 retweets for every original tweet.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Parse.ly has concluded that the sites which do best on Twitter are those which produce "interesting and shareable content that appeals to a large number of people". That's just 74 characters.

In New Zealand there are around 300,000 active users. Lorde is the New Zealand tweeter with most followers (4,281,328), followed by T Mulligan (who? – 910,485 followers), Daniel Gillies (788,147), Zane Lowe (695,583), the All Blacks (619,310), Dan Carter (552,172) and Kim Dotcom (480,512).

The first New Zealand business to pop up is Air New Zealand, in eighth place with 462,034 followers. The next is Vodafone NZ, in 51st place (72,077). Twitter has a strong focus on personality and individuals. Many businesses are trying hard to make it work, but its impact and usefulness is debatable.

While some members of the New Zealand legal profession are prolific tweeters (barrister Graeme Edgeler is way out in front with 35,300 tweets), Twitter does not appear to be a mainstream communication tool. Of the biggest 100 law firms in New Zealand, 23 had a Twitter account at 18 April. One of those has still to make a tweet. Several have not tweeted for years.

It's possible that many law firms are just too busy to bother with Twitter. One lesson many new tweeters learn is not to madly follow everyone they come across. This can result in a constant barrage of tweets with nothing really gained – unless you're happy to sit there all day watching.

The New Zealand Law Society has operated a Twitter account since February 2011. In that time it has accumulated 2,158 followers, followed 807 and tweeted 2,063 times. As far as follower numbers go, that is very good for the legal services industry. To give an idea of legal twitterings in New Zealand, we compiled the following listings. These are hopefully comprehensive, but sincere apologies to any prolific legal tweeters who have been overlooked. Note that Chapman Tripp and Tripe Matthews Feist have restricted access to information on their followers.

Tweeting barristers and individual lawyers in firms at 18 April 2016