Twitter has been growing at an exponential rate, especially thanks to the latest buzz of Ashton Kutcher being the first user to hit the 1 million followers mark on the micro-blogging service and the amazing Oprah effect which has attracted millions of sign-ups after her first tweet of “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.” I was searching from various sources to find out how many users have registered the social platform but unfortunately I just couldn’t find one reliable source. Only the folks at Twitter – Evan Williams, Biz Stone and the rest are aware it but they didn’t want to reveal the exact statistics. On the other hand, rival Facebook provides users with a comprehensive list of information such as General Growth, User Engagement, Applications and many more.
However, at least I’m able to calculate how many active users are there on Twitter. Grabbing data from GigaTweet, an interesting web tool which counts the number of tweet in real-time, I’ve managed to do some mental calculations from the statistics provided by the service. According to the graphs, 8 million tweets and an average of 6 updates are being posted by users daily. Therefore, this works out to be around 1.3 million active Twitterers using the website daily. This statistics is far away from its “social enemy” which has more than 100 million users log on to Facebook to chat with friends, post pictures or update their profiles at least once each day.
To be honest, I am kind of surprised that the number of active users is way too low as compared to Facebook which has at least 50% of its registered users to use it frequently. By taking 10 million Twitter accounts as a guesstimate, only 10% of the total population are willing to share their daily lives, thoughts and opinions about a particular subject with their friends everyday. Probably the rest (90%) either just want to find out what’s so great about Twitter and sign up for an account but don’t update or log-in occasionally to post a tweet or two.
Of course, 1.3 million active users isn’t an accurate value because GigaTweet doesn’t takes into consideration of private accounts as their tweets don’t appear in public timeline. I’ve just checked out TweetRush (a real-time Twitter user and client stats tool) but its average 2 million daily tweets count is a far distance away from GigaTweet’s 8 million. This doesn’t makes any sense!
Currently, GigaTweet has reported over 1.577 billion tweets with its peak hour at 10 p.m. featuring over 600,000 tweets! So this is good time for bloggers and Internet marketers to share their links and attract more clicks.