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One of the most important aspects of engaging your audience on Twitter is understanding how your consumers access it. Although it might seem irrelevant, knowing how your consumers connect with social media can give you more insight into not only what type of consumers they are, but what they are looking for from you as a business.

This week, the gang over at Rapleaf published a study on the popularity of Twitter clients. With over 1900 Twitter clients available, Rapleaf analyzed the 20 most recent tweets from over 4 million Twitter users to find out which Twitter client wins the popularity contest. The winner? Twitter.com.

Even with big competition from popular Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, Twitterriffic, Tweetie, TwitterFon and mobile update platforms, Twitter.com still wins by a landslide. Over two-thirds (65%) of tweets are sent out from the web. Mobile phones came in a very distant second by accounting for only 1/10th as many tweets as the web. However, the top 5 Twitter clients were found to account for 82% of all tweets, while the top 10 accounted for over 90% of all tweets. Only 20% of tweets came from mobile devices.

Since Twitter boasts an open API platform that allows anyone to build their own Twitter client, the potential for expansion is limitless. Currently, there’s room for massive growth in the mobile and desktop sectors. And although this study doesn’t compare any demographics with Twitter accession, it is interesting to see the way users go about entering Twitter. Plus, your company could correlate these results with your own marketing demographic studies to draw your own conclusions. It just might help you out in the long run.