New data today coming from the SmashSummit puts Twitter in new light. Sure, Compete says that Twitter is stagnant or shrinking but that is hardly the case.
Twitter, now some 105,779,710 users strong is growing by 300,000 users a day. That works out to over 8% growth a month. Facebook by comparison has over 400 million active users, and is growing by over 500,000 new users daily.
Facebook has stricter standards as to just what it means to be a user, but the growth rate of Twitter is hard to downplay. At its daily rate it is convincing nearly 10 million people a month to sign up and try its service. Very impressive for a company attempting to create a new method of communication.
In the “other data” department, Twitter handles over 600 million search queries a day. Twitter search (check it out here) is a wildly popular method of finding out what the world (or at least the internet enabled portion) thinks about a certain topic or item. It is the essence of real time, provided that Twitter is online at that moment.
Finally, Twitter has some 175 employees, a tribute to its fat financing and recent moves into monetization via “promoted tweets.” The data confirms it, Twitter hit the mainstream is growing like a weed infused with anabolic steroids. Facebook still crushes it in terms of total and total active users, but the little startup that could is racing to catch up.
Almost as much as we are huh.
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Those are some staggering numbers. At the current rate of growth, both Twitter and Facebook will max in growth fairly quickly because there are only so many Internet users on the planet! Also, this goes to show the power of social media websites as a business. 175 employees can have a business that supports 100 million users. If these numbers are not convincing a business to take advantage of the current social media craze, then they apparently don’t know how to adapt to change. Social media is a part of the world in news, business, politics, statistics, and eventually it will expand to all industries.