Earlier in the 2nd Quarter of 2011 at the Chirp Conference for Twitter Developers held in San Francisco, Twitter revealed some its much-awaited performance statistics and the highlights are detailed below:
– 105,779,710 users
– 300,000 users added per day
– 18,000 unique visitors each day
– 75% of Twitter traffic is outside of Twitter.com (using 3rd party apps)
– 55 million tweets per day
– Twitter search engine gets 600,000,000 request per day
– 175 employees run Twitter
Furthermore, Twitter has 1.33% Market Share of the top Social Media Web sites per Hitswise.com on 7/2/11, by comparison Facebook has an astounding 61% market share!
There is absolutely no question that Twitter is a volume powerhouse – it processes micro blogs on a staggering scale but how active are Twitter users?
I raise that question because as my number of Twitter followers increases in size so do the number of people I follow and now I struggle with the sheer scale of my Twitter account having lost the intimacy that I had interacting with a smaller number of followers.
Pondering this question, and the impact that the answer may have on my clients, I turned to a report produced by Yahoo Research called “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter”
You can download a copy of this report here
The conclusion of the reports reveals that… “Roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all posted URLs.”
So, while Twitter has some very impressive statistics the active users are much, much, smaller that the overall statistics indicate. Does this mean that business users should avoid Twitter as part of their marketing communication programs? Absolutely not, but per all market analysis the TAM (Total Available Market) is much smaller that the amorphous market and should be understood before developing any marketing strategy.
@georgebross
