Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Twitter Statistics - Does Twitter Have a Future?
Robert J. Moore has written an excellent report relating to statistics he has collected regarding use of Twitter. A summary of the statistics is;
There were 75 million Twitter accounts at the end of 2009.
The monthly rate of new user accounts is currently around 6.2 million new accounts per month (2-3 per second) - about 20% below July’s peak rate.
25% of accounts have no followers
About 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet.
About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times so only 20% are active Tweeters.
His conclusions are;
Twitter is still growing but the rate of new user signups has dropped from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts.
The percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months.
Twitter users who stay on the system after their first week as members show a high level of loyalty and keep Tweeting.
Those users who stay become more active over time.
With 75 million total accounts, and active users of around 20% still leaves around 15 million very active Tweeters.
Twitter recently backtracked and announced that it was not going to sell off this year as predicted but thatit was going to wait a couple of years and it is speculated that it will introduce advertising. I have commented previously on this and said that my feeling is that due to the fickle nature of the internet and its users they may be making the wrong decision. In 2 years time who know whether Twitter is still popular, something else could well have become the flavour of the month/year. No doubt Twitter is very important for social marketing but it does have some limitations which do need to be addressed.
If like me you manage a number of Twitter acounts for different businesses, it is extremely annoying to have to keep signing in and out of different accounts in order to tweet relevantly. Why do they not have a multiple account facility?
If ,for whatever reason, you wish to change your Twitter user name you can indeed do that without losing your tweets, followers etc but the main thing you CANNOT do is have your previous name redirected to your new name despite the fact that Twitter obviously knows both accounts are in fact the same. If you have built up pagerank for your old name then this is instantly lost as I found out! I have another post on Changing Twitter names.
Let’s hope they remedy these factors before another online system takes over their popularity and Twitter ends up worth tuppence ha’penny in 2 years time.
