The adoption cycle for Twitter is a bit strange. It goes something like this: Ever-increasing waves of hype, links, and attention bring in the newbies to Twitter.com where they get their first taste of Twitterdom. Some portion of those set up an account out of curiosity or a fear of being left behind. They try sending out a few Tweets, look around, get bored by the initial banality of the service and abandon it for other pursuits.
But that is not the end of it. A lot of them come back, either because they keep getting links from friends or keep hearing about it on TV or whatever, and then they slowly start to see the usefulness—a funny Tweet from a friend, a link to breaking news, a way to keep an eye on the general zeitgeist. Twitter is the kind of thing that is easier to experience than it is to explain. But it is an acquired taste and often requires repeated exposure before people get hooked. Once they do get hooked, there is no going back.
A good proxy for the level of general curiosity about what is on Twitter is how many people visit its Website. The worldwide numbers are out from comScore. In May, 2009, 37.3 million people visited Twitter.com, which is up 16 percent from April, 2009. The monthly growth slowed down from the 68 percent in April, but was not as flat as the 3.5 percent growth comScore reported for the U.S. in May.
Remember that these are month-over-month growth rates. The annual growth rate for global unique visitors in May, 2009 was 1,334 percent. And none of these numbers include the activity spurred by the Iranian elections in June, which I suspect will add to a pickup in month-over-month growth once again.
But let’s dive a little deeper into the data. The 37.2 million visitors include both people who use Twitter.com as their main interface with the service and curious visitors who aren’t necessarily registered users. About half of all active accounts, by some measures, access the service by desktop and mobile clients, and these numbers don’t count those. To some extent, the comScore number is a good measure of the general curiosity in Twitter for any given month. It doesn’t tell us the abandonment rate, but it does give us some peek at engagement.
Most people consume Twitter in a passive, sheep-like manner. They read other people’s Tweets more than they produce their own. How do we know people are reading stuff on Twitter? Look at Twitter’s pageviews. They are up 30 percent month-over-month to 900 million pageviews globally in May. So pageviews are up twice as much as unique visitors, which implies that each visitor is looking at twice as many pages as they were the month before.
And if you drill down deeper, the average pages per visitor is up to 24 pages per visitor per month, which indicates an almost-daily habit on average. That number is up from 13 pages per visitor per month in January, and 7 pages per visitor per month a year ago. In other words, the addiction is growing.
Twitter still sucks
hahaha
Hi Mark, how are you? How is Facebook custom url rush? And that Everyone button…
Btw, Twitter sucks is it? But it is Facebook which is letting it reign. And man, it will rule till you guys find a way to outsmart them (applies to all Mark Zuckerbergs)
lol
hahaha…. u’ve made one of the funniest comments with the least words.. LOL
hehe!!!
As Dave Morin wisely stated, the facebook “/ is the new @” (after the FB “username” launch)
cheers!
No it doesn’t i love it.
And we will still crush them
Addicted.
I liked your comment, “Twitter is the kind of thing that is easier to experience than it is to explain. But it is an acquired taste and often requires repeated exposure before people get hooked.”, because this represents my experience using Twitter. It wasn’t until I started using TipTop to unveil all the rich and timely content the Twitter users publish that I really saw the power of this micro-blogging platform. Fortunately TipTop can unleash the value in this massive volume of information and engage users at their level of need. A search on TipTop for “Techcrunch” http://www.feel...com/techcrunch/ not only provides constantly live search and relevant results for all the Tips (positive messages) and Pits (comments with negative sentiment) related to the search terms, but you can also filter the thousands of messages by related concepts and categories. Where else can you get sentiment infused natural language search results for queries such as http://www.feel...k+you+can+dance. TipTop is pushing the envelope in this respect.
Greg Martin
This is an excellent article and I like your comment, too. Thanks. I believe that a powerful data mining and search tool like TipTop will help Twitter break through this cycle. As far as I can see, TipTop is the only product out there that shows clearly how rich Twitter really is and can be. TipTop is Twitter 2.0 & Twitter 3.0 to make an analogy with Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. What this means for search in general is worthy of a separate discussion.
Glue sniffing is an acquired taste.
Great analysis
I half agree. Read the first 2 paragraphs and see if you see any support (data) whatsoever for the claims. I don’t. It could be based on Erick talking to 10 friends, or his own experience, or data that he’s not sharing, we don’t know. The rest of the article, however gives meaningful data (not related to the claims of paragraph 1 and 2, but useful, meaty data). So I’m half with you on the good analysis claim.
lol
The Iranian election has nothing to do with this btw. Twitter will definitely be able to continue the same exact growth trajectory based on excessive media drooling, continuing world revolutions and celebrity spam.
That’s exactly what happened to me. Signed up on Twitter, and then kinda forgot about it for a long time. But it kept making news, so I eventually went back. Starting to use a desktop client for Twitter made a big difference though.
I agree with Nilesh here. When Twitter was new I also made a profile but never actually used it for a long time. I heard people talking about it everywhere. After that I seriously looked into it and now I am a regular user and have 1500+ followers.
You start to like Twitter once you begin to understand its benefits.
Same here. Created a profile in the very beginning—when it wasn’t very cool. Now, I love it.
Oh, and thanks for the genuine comment. I think you will do a lot better for your website this way.
Thanks Spencer. Sorry about yesterday.
No problem.
haha
twitter can seriously get annoying when one person updates in the next 1hour.
it’s like facebook’s baby cousin (status update: what’s on your mind?)
This doesn’t take into account that real twitter power users never actually “visit” the site, but use an API such as tweetdeck to tweet.
That’s true. Anyone know if API hits count as pageviews or are they separate? If the latter, then Twitter’s usage is far more than the numbers in the article suggest.
TechCrunch is the biggest source of hot air for the Twitter Bubble. Has anything changed since the Harvard study that said the average all-time tweets per user is 1 and that 10% of users generate 90% of tweets?
Meanwhile, 1 in 5 or so TechCrunch posts are froth about Twitter
mashable is the worst offender. They post too much hype about twitter.
No kidding. TechCrunch is only posting a lot about Twitter because there is a lot to talk about. Yes, maybe they focus a lot of their time on Twitter, but at least what they talk about is interesting.
Mashable, which is a pretty good blog, posts random stuff about twitter.
That would be because they are “The Social Media Guide”. A little look over at their logo would’ve cleared your doubts.
Great stuff Erick.
Look at this graph from Google Insights for Search for Twitter searches:
Filters:
USA
Last 90 days
http://www.goog...03-m&cmpt=q
Note April (Oprah Effect) and June (#iranelection). Then look at drop offs.
Comscore goes to May – Google Insights goes to June http://www.tech...ng-behind-bing/
also, more regional interest in 1) New York than 2) SF on per capita type basis…. makes sense, #140conf for one.
DEAD ON. I followed that cycle exactly. I joined in 2007, hated it, dropped it until last years #TC50, then fell in love. It’s been addiction ever since. Great damn post Erick.
Twitter is like a really bad pop song that you hear over and over again(like Black eyed peas ‘humps’). Eventually you like it because the media burned it into your brain that it is awesome. But the hype dies and you step back for a bit, you realize damn that was lame.
The hype with the “Hump” is what I live 4 and get drunk on weekends 4.
I want to like it very much, but still isn’t a site i feel like visiting everyday, I am also on the cycle, early sign up , then abandoned, and have been going back. I’m following a bunch of very entertaining, and also productive people. Still not compelled to go back regularly, not like my addiction to techcrunch. Whats wrong with me ?
I haven’t got it in me to download a desktop client, and tweeting from the website makes no iota of sense. What am I doing right now? Frickin reading a post on TechCrunch about a subject that I have no interest in.
F My Life
I couldn’t agree more. I think on the first visit people get overwhelmed. When they get the hang of it their on it for days on end. Then they get sick of it, and disappear for a while. Some time goes by, and then their back, as addicted as ever.
I think they should change their name to “Critter” – crack + twitter.
This is a timely article. I signed up for twitter a year and a half ago and maybe tweeted once a month and didn’t even really look at other people’s pages. Around January of this year I started following people and checked that at least once a week.
As of a few days ago I’ve been logging in every day and interacting a little more with it, just randomly really. We’ll see if I continue to make it a part of my life or if I just drop it again.
I didn’t Twitter ’til I got TwitterFox — I’m new. Right now I read more than write, but I see five uses:
1. Share my stuff; brief insights.
2. Share links; to mine and others’ stuff.
3. Get news.
4. Contribute to a conversations *live*. Or an at least an recent one.
5. Connect with people.
That list isn’t ordered well. And I expect my usecase to change. People like Scoble have 100k+ followers. You use Twitter differently at that point.
Posting this anonymously for fear of backlash considering what I do for a living, but while I use Twitter quite a bit, am a very active useretc…I still don’t really love it. I see tweets come through all day, and could seriously care less. I care more about re-reading my own stream than reading anyone elses’ useless banter!
So why do I stick with it? Largely for professional purposes. I need to know, so I play with it incessantly. But it’s just not that interesting to me…99% crap.
And yes, many of my Twitter contacts are actual friends, not just the useless auto-follow crowd. But despite that, they tweet things I could care less about. Here are some gems:
- Wow, it’s gone down 10 Celsius in the last 20 minutes . .
- Sending off my former intern in style tonight. Nothing like beers shared to say thanks for all your hard work.
- Shaq to the Cleveland Cavs. Wow! #NBA
…wow. So useful.
I dunno. I know a lot of people who are in the same boat as I am. I don’t think Twitter will go away or fail, but once the media finds a new it-girl to follow, let’s see how those traffic levels look then.
Yeah, Twitter is a great concept, but when will their UI improve? pretty dull looking!
open-tube.com
Very interesting stats. Thanks. I can tell from sharing Tweets using Twurl that most regular users are not accessing Twitter directly so this gives us a good indication of how the general public is using Twitter and that they are getting more interested.
I suspect those who regularly click on what I share there are primarily power users, bloggers, and marketers so their much higher usage on desktop clients is not skewing these numbers.
Indeed curiosity plays huge factor. Never know what strange content will be posted. Facebook same issue. I use both daily for personal and research as I am creating “the next big thing” that will generate unbelievable buzz even TC will tire of. Thanks Twitter (and FB).
i like twitter, started to use about week ago, and realize that there are a lot of traffic
The page views/statistics above does not include those twitterers who use desktop tools to access their Twitter account. Tools such as twitterific, seismic desktop, tweetdeck not to mention the iphone twitter apps which will account for even more active twitter users.
Your addiction to crack cocaine is also growing.
twitter is the new google, it isn’t going away any time soon…
I think it’s far too soon for that prediction and who’s to say that Google won’t eventually acquire the service..
Last statistic I read was that 40% of users access Twitter via the website Twitter.com (I think Tweetdeck had 15% of users).
But that data was from a few months ago & with all of the new users, I bet it is higher…it takes a while to find out about Tweetdeck, Twhirl, and other third party clients.
I don’t see the appeal of visiting a social networking, reading messages but never joining but I was told by folks at Twitter that a large % of those visitors to the website are just that…visitors, not registered users. My guess is that they are mostly looking at news & celebrity accounts.
TWITTER ECOSYSTEM: TRY TWEETDECK, TWEETSTATS, TWISTORI, TWUBS + MANY MORE
The twitter ecosystem is awesome. Pick a tool you like (e.g., tweetdeck for posting and viewing posts, twubs for tracking hashtags) and soon you will be addicted.
I think all it takes for someone to get hooked to Twitter is one wholesome conversation with a stranger.
One of the best features of twitter is stocktwits. It lets users post comments regarding stocks, ETFs, etc.
I also found http://invetrics.com a great site to get stock market timing signals for free.
Michael
not a sharp increase (just test the Gravatar)
These numbers remind me of MySpace’s in its early growth 2004-2005 (although it was accounts for MySpace, not visitors). I wonder how the two would compare.
I really get tired of the folks that “Tweet” over and over. Going to the store…reading the paper….going to work.
I want to get quality content that will help me grow my business, not bore me with someone’s personal obsession with themselves.
If people don’t post that much, doesn’t mean they’re sleeping users. Maybe you could devide the twitter-users in
* social versus information-related users;
* quantitative versus qualitative producing tweets-users;
* company’s versus persons;
* beginners versus pro’s;
* mobile users/travelers versus solid users/stayers (working at a company, don’t travel a lot);
* mobile phone Tweeters versus computer Tweeters.
In each of these category’s there’s a difference in how often Twitter-users (are able to) post their tweets.
For me, I would love it if there was a button on Twitter, so I can choose to squeeze out the informal Tweets on where people are going, and concentrate on the links people post. Would be a nice lifehack, saves a lot of scrolling time!
My statement is: Not posting twenty times a day doesn’t mean that people don’t add quality to the Twitter network.
… just scrolled a little bit through the comments from others: I like the comment from @jackcristopher !
also RT @TEDchris : http://tedchris...w-twitter-users
…..Read #3 and #4!
Kind regards,
@geertjevanberlo
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Do you still have a two-part edition of the show or is this limited just to summer time? ,