If you use your statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support, rather than illumination (with thanks to Winston Churchill for another great quote), then today’s dueling Twitter reports will leave you reeling.
Is Twitter growth accelerating? Or has it peaked? We describe two apparently widely disparate studies below — take your pick of and tell us your opinion! Or you could just wait until the next set of studies comes out…
Twitter Growth Accelerates!
First, the glass-half-full report. WebProNews has been looking at Twitter’s growth in terms of new user registration and number of Tweets. According to this source, which cites data drawn from the Twitter API, December’s numbers showed an increase in tweeting frequency, as Twitter surpassed a billion tweets in a month. In January, total tweets sent were the largest on record, increasing at 6.34% over December–which they do admit is the second-lowest increase for the last twelve months.
Still, new registrations saw a 32% month-over-month increase, the largest since April, and the most registrations ever in a single month at 9.4 million. These numbers were supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer for Twellow. He also provided a series of graphs, based on data from the Twitter API, which are reproduced in the WebProNews article.
Twitter Growth is Slowing!
A separate study by RJMetrics, reported in SF Gate, downloaded 2 million tweets from about 50,000 users over the last few months of 2009, and found that by year-end Twitter had just over 75 million user accounts, about 35 million less than the previously cited report. According to this report, the monthly rate of new user accounts peaked in July 2009 and is currently running at around 6.2 million new (the article is not clear on the time frame, but implies we are talking about December). This rate is about 20% below July’s peak rate, which directly contradicts the conclusions drawn by the WebProNews data.
RJMetrics also determined that about 25% of accounts have no followers and about 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet. Also, “About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times” and “Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.”
