As we reported earlier, Twitter has published new figures showing that it now has 145 million registered users. The thing is, that doesn’t really tell us much about how many people are actually using the service.
“Registered users” is very different to “Active users”. Facebook, for example, announced in July that it had over 500 million active users. This is a statistic that Facebook recently tweaked to improve its accuracy and should give a good indication of how many people regularly interact with the site.
Twitter, however, doesn’t give this figure, making it difficult to determine the true size of its userbase. Third party developers who work with the API have their own ideas. Jesse Stay is the man behind SocialToo, a service that provides useful tools for Twitter and Facebook users. Commenting on Twitter’s latest stats via Google Reader today, he says:
“I wish they’d go with the number their competitors are going with – number of active users. Just stating # of registered users is an unfair comparison (unless they really want Facebook to start touting the number of registered users on their system). My own estimates show only about 30% of Twitter’s numbers are active, based on a sample of 5-10 million users I have cached.”
Now, that’s only one developer and we’ve no way of verifying what he says. However, when you bear in mind all the people who try the service and leave; people who have registered themselves but not used their accounts; not to mention spam accounts, there’s bound to be a significant drop-off from that 145 million figure.
Twitter’s latest stats say that 78% of users access its service via Twitter.com. According to Comscore, the site received nearly 93 million unique visitors in June. However, visitors don’t necessarily equal active users as some are likely to visit, for example, individual celebrity pages without actually signing up themselves. Yet more traffic will come from search engine results too.
In short, we don’t know how many people are actively using Twitter and until they release such a figure, we can but guess.
Since most Twitter content is public and Facebook is generally only usable when logged in, your question is less relevant than at first sight. E.g. is a person who visits a celebrity’s Twitter feed on twitter.com 3 times a month, without ever logging into the service to participate in the conversation, an active user or not? I’d certainly argue so.
To take the analogy further, Techcrunch has only 10 active users, but 10M monthly uniques. Facebook may have 500M active users, but what’s the multiple with monthly uniques? 1.1x? I’d assume Twitter is significantly higher, something like 4x maybe?
So let’s get back to basics: monthly uniques is a good, if flawed, comparison across sites that have different use cases and are accessible in different ways. What your article is thus lacking is a monthly uniques number for Facebook, not an active user number for Twitter. :)
Thanks Martin for the great post and for paying attention to that. Of note, when I say “active users”, I mean more than 20 Tweets total over the lifetime of the account. That’s my definition at least. I believe Damon Cortesi (@dacort) at one point suggested his cache (which is a bit bigger than mine) suggests similar numbers.
I think that although “active users”, being people that post on twitter 20 times or some such is also misleading. When I started on twitter my account and even now I wouldn’t be considered active. But I follow dozens of people and read hundreds of tweets a day, even if not actively participating in the conversation.
Your article discusses the relative numbers for Facebook and Twitter with a criteria that appears skew toward commerce potential. The API and services aren’t directly comparable. More importantly you say nothing about differences in user content or company mission. I use both to microblog like a lot of connected readers without taking advantage of mobile services. Evan William’s Twitter to date has done more for human rights, journalism, and net neutrality in places like Iran than Facebook probably ever will. Thus far Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is used more for legal surveillance and online gambling than Twitter ever will. So what is Facebook really winning in pushing for more market control?
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html
Agreed. What facebook ‘appears’ to be trying to ‘conquer’ in terms of numbers I really have very little interest in. Any number of the deeds done by people while on twitter has considerably more ‘feel’ n relevance to myself; and to many others . . . choose your poison, as folks in the past used to say – do something of value; or do something you may regret in your own future . . .
Frankly, i doubt that Facebook has 500 million active users. Of course, it depends on what Facebook calls “active”. Out of 60 friends i have on Facebook, almost 10% had no activity in the past 3 months or even more.
Twitter and Facebook, as well as so many other social media tools, have lots of users who are not active and the percentage is really hard to find. But, in my opinion, it doesn’t really matter.
Why do i care if it’s 5, 15 or 60 million? i just need to follow a few hundreds and get what i need.
Wow,I had no Idea there were that many people on twitter…How did I get on the listorious “most listed on twitter”?!!I’m #359….I’m puzzled…..at my achievement…anyway,I follow back if you need one more follower…
Tristan Ginnett