More than 90% of tweets from Twitter staff are sent via Twitter-owned channels

There are countless ways by which we can tweet today, thanks to all manner of desktop, Web-based, mobile and third party apps that make it easy to stay in touch wherever we are and whatever we do.

Twitter has since clamped down on third party apps, but you can peruse the Internet for a thousand guides to making the best of those clients. However, why not take a look at how the pros do it…and when we say ‘pros’, we mean Twitter’s own employees.

Thanks to data from Twitter’s Isaac Hepworth, who measured all tweets sent by Twitter’s staff during 1-7 February, we now know that Twitter.com is the most used channel, accounting for 35 percent of employee tweets. That’s hardly a surprise given the emphasis Twitter is putting on encouraging traffic to the site, which was redesigned extensively last year.

According to the chart below (which you can click on for a larger image), we estimate that 94 percent of all tweets during the period were sent through official, Twitter-owned channels. The results are very much as you’d expect but nevertheless they are interesting.

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The top seven clients — which include Twitter for Mac, Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android — are all official Twitter channels, with Instagram coming in as the most used third party service. However, the blockbuster photo app accounts for a mere 2 percent of tweets.

Tweetdeck, which Twitter bought last year, is perhaps surprisingly less popular than we expected, although it may be used to monitor Twitter rather than actually tweet. The top third party services with Twitter integration are Foursquare, Flipboard — now available for the iPhone — and highly rated mobile social network Path.

Despite the hundreds that are available, just three dedicated Twitter apps from third parties make the list; Tweetbot, the iOS app which just released an improve second version, YoruFukurou (known as NightOwl), a Mac OSS X client “designed for Twitter addicts”, and Echofon, a popular app available on a range of platforms.

Camera on iOS is also interestingly well used. Indeed, Apple’s integration of Twitter into the heart of its iOS5 mobile operating system saw new sign-ups from iOS devices increase three fold.

What about you: We’re not at all surprised by Twitter’s own usage of the service, but why not tell us what your favourite Twitter client is, and why?