Ah, the twitter growth – it’s not a too-mah
If you got the last part of that title, then you are old like me. If not, check out some early 90’s Shwarzenegger movies with 5 year olds in ‘em. But I digress, the point of this post isn’t movie history, its the slowdown of twitter. As Techcrunch reports:
Marketing software startup HubSpot has put together its third ‘State of the Twittersphere’ report, which is based on an analysis of more than 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets, collected by the company’s free Twitter Grader tool.
The main take-away from the report (PDF): peaking at around 13% in March 2009, growth in new Twitter users has recently slowed down significantly, dropping to a mere 3.5% in October 2009. That’s still growth, but a mind-blowing growth rate it is no longer.
And as we’ve reported before, visits to Twitter.com have declined in number too, dropping 8% in October 2009. Also, Erick yesterday posted a must-read analysis of how the realtime web (and Twitter specifically) can be measured, if you’re interested.
We should also note Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted that they had their single biggest usage day on Jan 12, and that they were expecting to break that record again the day after. That is well possible, and consistent with HubSpot’s findings:
…
- Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July 2009, it had 70
- The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July 2009 it was only following 47
– The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July 2009 that number was 119…
- 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations were outside North America in July 2009
– 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations are outside North America in January 2010Looking at user patterns, HubSpot found that Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in the analysis, while 10-11 pm appears to be the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day.
I saw a similar article on Mashable the other day which talked about the slowdown or even decline in Twitter pageviews over the pat few months. Meanwhile Facebook has continued to grow fast (despite their problems with the interface…but that’s another post). I think the Twitter user base will continue to grow slowly. People just don’t have as much random stuff to say. However as a stream of junk with the occasional nugget of interesting information, Twitter is really serving a purpose and offering marketers a new chance to get the word out. So I hope they continue to, well, exist, I guess, b/c it ain’t clear how they’ll make money at it.