For the past few months, we haven’t been hearing any pretty exciting statistics about Twitter. Growth at Twitter seems to have been quietened down.
Analysts over at RJMetrics yesterday published a report about the latest data on Twitter’s users and engagement, which paints a two-sided picture of the future of the San Francisco-based Internet company.
As of December 2009, the total number of registered user accounts was 75 million. Although that figure may seem to be rather impressive, but in fact the percentage of active Twitter users is quite worrying. In the early days, close to 80 per cent of the Twitter community are active users. However, it has dropped consistently over the past six months, reaching an all-time low of 17 per cent. In other words, only 15 million users publish at least one tweet a month, a far cry from what many bloggers and companies have expected.
The study also noted that 80 per cent of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times, which translates to a shocking 60 million. The average Twitter user has 27 followers, a huge drop from 110 followers the year before and 190 followers in 2007. 25 per cent of Twitter accounts have no followers and the number of users who have over 500 followers makes up a relatively small slice of pie of the entire population. Apparently, Biz Stone and Co. should start pulling up their socks and figure out why people are losing steam with the service.
On the other hand, they have done a pretty good job in garnering people to join the micro-blogging platform. The growth rate of Twitter currently stands at about 6.2 million a month, eight times higher than in 2008 but about 20% lower than the July 2009 peak of 7.8 million. If its current growth of 6.2 million users every month continues, Twitter could reach its milestone of 100 million registered users by either April or May this year. In September 2009, Twitter’s valuation was US$1 billion, which works out to be an average of $66.66 for every active user account.
