*Note: I may tend to repeat statistics and information from previous posts but I’ll improve on them.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto, California-based social networking company is gaining popularity much faster than any Web 2.0 apps or platforms and has attracted millions of users worldwide especially the under 30 age group. Even tailing closely behind Myspace is losing its power and it’s heading south tremendously according to Alexa rank. However, today I’m not going to brag out how well Facebook has performed as compared to a few years back but I’d like to share with you some valuable statistics and observations about the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform – Twitter.
Just like Facebook, the Twitter community is getting “hot” and its killing its fellow micro-blogging rivals such as Plurk and Yammer with its lethal skills in this niche. Although it can’t possibility beat the mighty and impressive Facebook, but at least it’s community is growing at an “exponential” rate.
Before I share with you guys about the performance of Twitter, I’d like to explain why it has managed to hit the bull’s eye so quickly. First of all, great thanks to the excessive media coverage by famous news websites and broadcasting companies which includes BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many more. Besides that, many popular blogs love posting articles related to Twitter. For example, influential tech blog TechCrunch and the social blog Mashable. The most crucial factor which results in a spurt of growth of Twitter is that celebrities are using it. When Barack Obama, Lance Armstrong, Stephen Fry and Britney Spears are on the micro-blogging service, more people tend to sign up and follow their updates.
I’ve grabbed information from multiple sources such as Google Trends, Alexa Rank, Twitterholic and TwitterRush to show you that “Twitter Is Growing At An “Exponential” Rate Just Like Facebook”. Enjoy!
From the graph below taken from Google Trends, it shows that more search queries about Twitter were being made on Google and it is heading up north steeply starting from the last quarter of 2008 as compared with its fellow Web 2.0 pioneers which includes Digg, Flickr and Delicious.
This graph clearly shows that Twitter’s reach has boosted tremendously from less than 0.05% in October 2007 to its peak of 0.32% in February 2009, a significant increase. Similarly, its rank has dropped from 4,000+ to a current of only 233! Besides that, its page-views shows a 500% increase. What an amazing feat in just one and a half year!
According to Compete, Twitter’s month-to-month change is an upward trend of 32.7% whereas for the year-to-year change, it’s 964.5%. For the month of February, it states that it has 8 million unique visitors using the platform but I believe that this stats this inaccurate as Biz Stone has explained in an interview that it has around 4-5 million active users, a drastic difference between both sources.
A service that only tracks websites based on the number of US people who have visited them, Twitter was ranked #163 and its monthly US people has reached 6.1 million, a 600% boost from August last year. Other stats include US Demographics of which 47% and 53% are male and female group respectively. Also, the main bulk comes from the 18-34 age group.
Dubbed as a real-time Twitter user and client statistics, its graphs show that an average of 2 million tweets are posted by users daily and it reaches its peak of around 67,000 during UTC 15 time zone. It’s quite tough to gage whether it’s growth rate is boosting or not since it only provides the past week stats.
A platform that is responsible of tracking millions of users worldwide, Twitterholic presents users with the rankings of Twitterers in the world or by location based on the number of followers. Although this tool doesn’t explains much unlike the sources which I’ve mentioned earlier on, but I’ll use it to list some examples of why “Twitter Is Growing At An “Exponential” Rate Just Like Facebook”. Several months ago, I could easily be included in the list of the Top 100 rankings with only 8,000+ followers. However, currently, one would need an astounding 50,000 followers! This obviously shows that more people are joining the Twitter network and start following users there. Another example would be the amazing increase of followers per day by top users. Previously, CNN was moving at a steady pace of around 1,000 daily. But guess what! Now an average of 10,000 people follows the news company!
