In 2003, the Internet was in a phase of transition. The ...
What Twitter’s Massive Traffic Growth Slowdown Means For Us All
Twitter’s user growth went from bad to worse in December, declining to a phenomenally anemic 3.4% rise in new users.
Everyone and their blog is trying to make sense of just what this means. Of course, it is important to recall that @Ev stated recently that Twitter is hitting new usage highs before we all get our panties tangled; what does this all mean?
I firmly believe that Twitter is only useful because it hit a user critical mass. Twitter in and of itself has nearly zero value. FriendFeed was always better at importing feeds of content, but Twitter won the day because people flocked to it. Twitter touched a nerve in global society in all the right ways.
But now Twitter is struggling to find its old growth. The service is still growing, and is bigger than it has ever been. However what happens in the next few months is what will decide if we are still using Twitter in a years time. Facebook is the elephant in this room. Call it the war of the two US-based social networking titans.
The dilemma with Twitter’s growth completely running out of gas is that Facebook is having no such problems. Even if Facebook saw a 50% decline in its growth, it would still be a large multiple of Twitter’s monthly new user accretions. A very large multiple.
Recall that Facebook was adding hundred of thousands of new users daily recently. We have no reason to think that that has changed. In the United States Facebook is hardly hurting, adding some four million unique users in December alone. Factor in international growth, and Facebook could have grown by ten million uniqes total.
It seems that finally Facebook’s user momentum and constant addition of Twitter features to its vast audience is hurting its smaller rival. In the middle of 2009, when Twitter seemed to be a bullet the no one could stop, Facebook began to copy features that users loved on Twitter. We just saw them add in a retweet capability, and Facebook does not seem to want to give the copy machine.
Taking all that into consideration, where are we headed? With the Twitterification of Facebook continuing, either Twitter innovates in its system, expanding its capabilities to match the Facebook threat, or they continue to lose the traffic and new user war to Facebook. Their growth remains poor or Twitter begins to lose users.
A 3.4% growth rate is dangerously close to a negative one, especially when it dropped three percent in the last month. One more bad month, and Twitter is, for the first time, shrinking. The chart that HubSpot prepared says it all quite plainly:
Facebook of course with huge expanding revenues can continue to expand its product, allowing it to replicate anything that Twitter adds, and more without breaking a sweat. I hate to say it, and it is the first time that I have ever done so, but Twitter’s future looks choppy. It is hardly without strengths, it has a fanatical userbase, and corporations are adopting it right and left. But the same goes for Facebook, and Twitter is not the market leader.
My prediction for three months for now is that Facebook continues its massive growth, and Twitter grows just a little. If that does come to pass, look for Twitter to begin its decline. Hell, they never even could figure out how to keep the service online.
Discussion - 15 Comments/Pingbacks RSS feed for comments on this post
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More people are simply using 3rd party clients. These figures don't include those
Yup, we've heard this before but again the problem is – what does new users mean? Does it mean new site visitors, or does it actually mean new account creations?
If just new website visits, than this is exactly what I would expect and there is nothing newsworthy about it. Anyone who uses Twitter knows that most users are now on 3rd party apps.
If this is a decline in actual new account creations, then we have something to talk about.
And I think we need to stop comparing Twitter to Facebook – these are two different platforms used primarily for two entirely different purposes. Yes there may be some overlap, but its like comparing Apples to Oranges. Yes, they are both fruit, but..
I'm not entirely surprised, Alex. While twitter has definitely revolutionized social networking, Facebook's kind of taken the wind out of Twitter's sails by replicating the functionality. It also seems to me that Twitter hasn't been as successful as Facebook at monetizing their subscriber base.
I don't see this as an issue for Twitter. Its simplicity is key, differentiating it from the larger, more gadget-based Facebook. I see them as two different animals.
I wonder how much of the exponential growth of Twitter was down to celebrity endorsement of the platform? Perhaps the crazy boom in popularity was down to the likes of Kutcher and co. relentlessly competing to amass followers? The spike in Twitter growth may have been artificially driven by celebs rather than people signing up to participate in this social medium. Now it seems Twitter has become “the norm” and I'm seeing less of @aplusk and more friends chatting online.
There you go, nailed it.
I think that better growth of facebook is mainly caused by people outside US (that's obvious) and I see that people in EU aren't so excited about the twitter. They use different apps, often local equivalents of twitt.
And because of that, while facebook literally eats eastern parts of Europe, twitter is still at the same point…
The new account growth peaked at the top of the Twitter hype, where all celebrities flocked to the site, pulling a large number of people in. At the end though, most of these people didn't do much with their account. Twitter needs to provide a more stable, faster, attractive platform, if it wants to go back to double-digit monthly growth.
Since most of the growth today happens outside of the US, one can expect that the growth will continue at the same rate until it reaches the same saturation level abroad as it already reached in the US. After that, it will all depends on whether Twitter can lure more people with new services. Come on, be creative, there are a few 1000's of companies in the Twitter eco-system. Become a free substitute for SMS worldwide, make a better use of geo-tagging, create new business models with corporations and small business that want to promote their image, their product, or collect information on their customers. I don't want Facebook to replace Twitter, this is NOT the same tool!
Twitter is really increasing sign ups this year probably!