Not a day goes by without hundreds of mentions of Twitter on blogs and TV (we’re as guilty as anyone), which naturally leads those still puzzled by the service or simply curious to learn more to search for it in Google. Those searches have been growing at a faster rate than even the service itself. In fact, the term “Twitter” seems to be one of the fastest growing search terms of all these days.
How popular is it? More popular than “britney.” Twitter surpassed “Britney” a few months ago, and has even caught up to “Obama” (actually it is slightly ahead right now), according to Google Trends. That is remarkable, given that Britney was one of the most searched for words of all last year. Still, maybe the switch says more about her than about Twitter. (Obama’s popularity as a search term has come down to more reasonable levels after huge spikes last November and during the inauguration).
Twitter is still dwarfed by Facebook, both on terms of traffic and as a search term. According to Google Trends, the keyword “facebook” is 81 times more popular than “twitter.” In terms of news references, however, the two are much closer. In the chart below, the top graph is search volume, and the bottom one is news references:
Finally, if you look at the Google Trends for Websites graph for Twitter.com, it looks like there is a tiny dip at the end there. After a period of such torrid growth, it certainly deserves to take a breather. But it cannot afford to take too much of a breather, otherwise people will stop talking about it and Britney will have her revenge.
Just think how popular Twitter would be if it could sing poorly and stopped wearing underwear in public.
OMG that made me cover my MacBook in coffee, thanks to the wonderful people at ImageCo
I think the little blue magpie already has the media coverage to rival her.
Is it possible that the downward trend in unique visitors to twitter.com is because an increasing number of users are using 3rd party software like TweetDeck, instead of going to twitter.com?
Is there actually a downward trend or are you just guessing? This article is regarding search traffic, not actual visitors to the website.
My guess is that we’ll see an influx of UV’s to Twitter App sites as a result of the recent worm outbreak.
folks still ask me what is twitter.
and they never ask you who Britney is?
Dude.. this twitter thing is scary.. seriously. Peeps who haven’t even heard of britney spears or the interwebs are outtwittering me. And some of those people are really old. I still don’t understand how tweet tweet works.
I used to think the old folks were billions of lightyears behind me with this internet thing. But twitter is going for world domination.
Hey, one has to rest after all that insanely wonderful lackadaisical sluttyness! She’ll be back at the top unless Miley Cyrus beats all tabloid guesses…
Just wondering, how can you actually measure news reference volume? Is that only online news or are they able to measure tv news too?
Facebook vs Twitter vs Britney vs Hulu vs Obama:
http://trends.g...=ytd&sort=0
Relative Query volumes:
twitter : 1.00
britney : 2.00
hulu : 1.00
obama : 6.00
facebook : 81.0
The numbers for Facebook are smaller if restricted to the US, but apparently it’s still 20x Twitter.
Godzilla VS. Mechagodzilla VS. Rodan VS. Optimus Prime would rock, thank you.
That’s pretty impressive, considering Britney’s in that list every year.
Twitter worth $10 billion? Possible. Google report a huge quarter? http://iamned.com/blog/ Web 2.0 no bubble
Wow… Britney is finally left alone.
Is she a spinster then?
I think twitter has no where to go but up. I think even though the general public has heard of twitter, there is a large population who thinks it is just people talking about when they brush there teeth. I think once the populous learns of the practical applications of twitter, like in Moldova: http://www.news...g_a_revolution/ it could become one if not the largest communication tool in the world.
I thought Britney hasn’t been relevant since 1999.
Twitter is also more important than religion
Comparing your popularity to Britney Spears seems like a grasp no matter how you slice it.
https://Spideroak.com
Just don’t try Jesus.
This may partially be due to the fact that a lot of people do not type “twitter.com” in their address bar but rather “twitter”, which in Firefox does a google search for the keyword and takes them to the top result.
Twitter is important because it allows people to interact who otherwise would be unable or unwilling to do so.
‘Follows’ do not have to be reciprocated, and that is its power. Both Ashton Kutcher and John McCain have less than 100 friends and are so are only bound to their updates, and not their 412k and 860k followers respectively. They can bypass the MSM and go straight to their audiences. Even Kutcher said he’d punk Ted Turner if he beats CNN to a million followers.
On that note, a new Twitter client and browser is Twit Ya – http://twitya.com
The number of people who Google a website’s domain name instead of going to it directly doesn’t necessarily correlate to the number of people who use it. Just saying.
I didn’t even know Britney was still popular over the past two years.
dude!
Album: Circus
Big single last year: Womanizer
Is the food good on the starbase
what is twitter?
I tried searching the site for more articles about it but could only find this one reference.
Anything about Twitter TC will publish – Fact!
If you just look at people googling “twitter”, rather than twitter.com, the graph is significantly steeper. And probably a better estimate of the “consciousness” regarding it
Check out http://www.boilingpage.com that brings the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter.
This is the real use case of Twitter and no wonder Twitter beats Britney!
Brittany makes a lot more money than Twitter.
twiter is QUAD
Twitter is a lot of hype remember when google bought their rival jaiku in 2007 or 2006 because they had better technology you wonder why google doesnt need to buy twitter because the member base is nothing they need they already get 500,000,000 hits a month assuming they put jaiku on their homepage for a day it would be the same as twitter. There is really no point to twitter. Text your friends you dont need to let them all know your in the mall shopping at Victorias Secret for your wife do you? I dont know maybe you do. For me its a obvious no brainer. NO
If you abandon or boycott Twitter you’ll simply take yourself from the loop. What were you saying about SMS when it came out? Twitter’s simply SMS internet-style, but much better.
Traffic figures will become increasingly less important as the web takes on more functional role.
Transaction figures will be king. As a previous commenter has mentioned, the reason traffic figures will dwindle is because experienced Twitterers use 3rd party apps such as Twhirl or Destroy Twitter.
Twitter isn’t a destination – its a platform. Talking about Twitter in traffic figures rather than actual users is like talking about the number of visitors to the Android website as opposed to the number of people who use it on their handsets.
More functional? QUE?
For a 40 year old concept to it’s release to y’all in the eighties or so…looks fine to me.
What do you expect? A huge accounting site?
Well I am not that surprised…
I agree that some of the search traffic may be the result of people being lazy and using firefox etc., but when we did a brief analysis of discussions occuring online during the same time period, we see the exact same trends
We did a short blog entry inspired by the google trends here:
http://bit.ly/2hCn3v