While I’m not one to make predictions, I, like everyone else, can’t help but notice the explosion of Twitter of late. There are several other microblogging services out there at the moment including; Plurk, Friendfeed, Tumblr, and Jaiku. Twitter has been getting much of the attention as it continues to grow at a torrid pace.
A report by HubSpot entitled, State of the Twittersphere, is based on real data pulled from hundreds of thousands of Twitter profiles accessed through the reports generated by Twitter Grader. It reveals that Twitter is adding 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts daily and that 70% of all current Twitter users joined in 2008.
There is a strong correlation between the number of followers (twollowers) you have and the number of people (tweeple) you follow. In twitterspeak, tweeple following eachother would be twiends. Read the twictionary to keep you up-to-date on this evolving new language.
Other key findings of the report:
Less than 1 percent have more than 1,000 followers
Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers
22 percent have only five or fewer followers
24 percent have between 11 and 25 followers
The most popular days of the week to Tweet are Wednesday and Thursday
I suspect that given the recent media attention from the presidential election and Mumbai attacks many newbies (including myself, although I’ve been a user since April 2008) are just beginning their micro-blogging experiment and haven’t had the time to build up their following. It’s amazing to look at the linear growth path your following takes as you interact and add people on twitter. Here’s a graph of my Twitterholic and TwitterGrade stats.
Data from Compete shows the increase in unique visitors on Twitter from November 2007 to November 2008. The number of unique visitors to the site held steady at just over 500k for the period November 2007 to February 2008. In March 2008, we started to see growth breaking out with unique visitors topping 1m and now holding at 3.5m in November 2008. Mashable’s summary of August 2008 data from Nielsen Online and TechCrunch’s write-up on data from comScore show a similar trend.
Catch another insightful review of the State of the Twittersphere on TechCrunch.
