If it wasn’t bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really has something to worry about. Facebook is growing faster than Twitter in the U.S., even though it is more than four times larger.
In the month of July, according to the latest estimates from comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., which was 14 percent higher than in June, 2009. Twitter, in contrast, only saw 21.2 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website, a 6 percent rise compared to the month before. In absolute terms, Facebook added about ten million new visitors in the month of July versus roughly one million new visitors for Twitter.
At 87.7 million uniques, Facebook moves from the sixth largest Web media property in the U.S. to the fifth, passing the combined sites of Fox Interactive Media (80.9 million uniques) and coming within striking range of AOL (104.8 million). That is just in the U.S. Facebook is already the fourth largest site in the world (and Twitter is doing better worldwide as well, with a total of 44.5 million unique visitors in June).
Note that these estimates are only for Twitter.com and do not include mobile or desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, or Tweetie, but it should be a good proxy for overall growth. Even if you double the numbers for Twitter, Facebook still trounced it in July (and the Facebook numbers don’t include activity on other sites other apps via Facebook Connect either).
These are month-over-month comparisons. On an annual basis, Twitter is still growing its audience much faster (2,614 percent ) than Facebook (124 percent) because it is coming off such a smaller initial base of users and this was the year it entered hypergrowth. But that hypergrowth seems to have slowed since the end of April, at least in the U.S. Between April and July, Facebook grew 30 percent in unique U.S. visitors, while Twitter only grew 25 percent, so it is more than just a one-month aberration.
So what happened in June to accelerate Facebook’s growth? I don’t think it was the vanity URLs. Rather, on June 24, Facebook turned on the “Everyone Button.” Facebook members who didn’t have public profiles (i.e. most people) all of a sudden had the option to share items in their stream with everyone else on Facebook, and they could decide to do this on an item-by-item basis.
The more items that are shared publicly, the more people who can see them. I believe this is what happened (and have asked Facebook for confirmation). Not only did this drive more people to Facebook, but it also increased the time spent on the site by a whopping 36 percent in June versus July. Twitter saw its time on site grow 26 percent in the same period, although in the chart comparing the two below you can hardly tell because Facebook users spent an estimated total of 15.8 billion minutes compared to 4.75 million minutes for Twitter. What that tells me is that the stream becomes more engaging the more public it becomes.
I’ve been confused by this “race” between facebook and twitter, can someone explain why? Twitter and facebook share a similar element in that they both have real time statuses, but surely the fact that facebook is an entire social network and twitter is just a “micro blogging” service makes them different? I mean, you may as well be comparing tmz.com and techcrunch, both are blogs and share breaking news but they’re aimed at entirely different markets.
I agree entirely with your thoughts, for some reason though facebook sees twitter as a real threat.
i don’t think that they see twitter as a threat, rather than as a service with potential for businesses. facebook has been struggling with their ads system, and now they are looking into the various ways businesses are monetizing their twitter streams.
i think that they should see each other as threats, but i do no think that comparing unique visitors to a website sheds any light on this competition. twitter is becoming much more expansive than a website.
“Everyone button” was introduced in limited beta, some ten thousands, and yes, i dont have it yet. Where are thousands and where are millions of growth??? Erick, this is your blind beleif that everyone stream thing rocks
What an analysis, i got frustrated.
Okey let me hint you, fb fan pages status updates that are introduced lately are “everyone real time stream”. Now rejoice!
““Everyone button” was introduced in limited beta, some ten thousands, and yes, i dont have it yet.
Okey let me hint you, fb fan pages status updates that are introduced lately are “everyone real time stream”. Now rejoice!”
No idea how to parse these sentences. Did you type it in a native language and ask google to translate it into “English”?
Twitter’s a powerful subset of FB functionality. Some would say it’s the best part without all the other $&#*
I’m not sure what overlay you would have between TMZ and Techcrunch but I bet you the % of people who visit both Twitter and FB in the same week is much much higher. Thus the threat.
Now, if Techcrunch starting delving deeper into the personal lives of all high tech execs…….hmmm. Nah, probably boring.
Did you look at the graphs?
I think the same thoughts went for comparison btwn google and m$ as well. Today google is challenging m$ on various areas.
Stop comparing the two. They are nothing alike. Vastly different audiences and purposes. I could give a shit how one compares to the other. Both will continue to exist, seperately, forever.
really? “forever” is a long time : )
Twitter will be either sell itself or merge with another company by the end of 2010.
i ‘m not even sure about the ‘everyone’ option. maybe it was the ‘live’ widgets that facebook introduced recently. I ‘ve seen those in various improbable situations, like the torrent tracker isohunt.
it would be very interesting to hear from facebook about it.
+1, Facebook Fan Box and Live Stream Widget.
Even though facebook is very popular I think some people are always going to want to have an alternative. People are saying that facebook is going to crush twitter because they acquired friendfeed. I think twitter will always have a mass following as well.
I believe that Twitter is doing an amazing job, with 21.2 million unique U.S. visitors. Facebook for one has been around longer, has more to offer than Twitter does, such as IM, apps, messaging, and socializing and, has a larger user base. For a small company I give two thumbs up to Twitter!
“but it should be a good proxy for overall growth.”
No, I’m not sure it should be. My example is a small one and so I could be wrong, but I’d say Twitter isn’t accessed from the website nearly as much as Facebook is. I see Twitter as being how people stay connected with a mobile phone away from their desk, either through text messaging or an application. Facebook has a much higher percentage of users that browse it from the website primarily though, and so I think this growth rate is very skewed.
I think you are right. Every person that I know who uses twitter, does so almost exclusively from applications.
“…In the month of July, according to the latest estimates from comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the U.S., which was 14 percent higher than in June, 2009. Twitter, in contrast, only saw 21.2 million unique U.S. visitors”
So Facebook has 87.7 million of these guys:
http://yepyep.g...l-douchebag.jpg
Not impressed.
there still not up on tweeting but once tweeting gets known better i bet you it beats facebook
it’s all over the media for months now. how could it possibly get better known than it is now?
+1
Like I’ve said before, once Facebook incorporate Twitter like features, who would really wanna hang out at twitter,? Twitter feels like a closet of a website while Facebook is wide open.
Disagree entirely. Facebook has no appeal to me. On the other hand, I love Twitter, because it’s simple and only has one feature – messaging. Facebook is a bloated pile of crap.
Facebook is known as a walled garden because it does not let information into the web from facebook. Tweets get individually indexed by search engines.
Do not be concerned over how it feels, facebook is the closed one.
This is an excellent post , thank you a lot.
Erick – I’ve recorded a new pop song about our Twitter/Facebook culture – It’s ‘Online World’ at http://dfactor.me
I think Twitter is for RIGHT NOW people – Facebook is EVERYONE I’VE EVER KNOWN IN LIFE reaching out to me TODAY! Yikes, too much!
Facebook delivers far more value than twitter. I don’t see why people are surprised that it continues to perform well. I say that as a longtime and avid twitter user.
Erick, I think you’re turning coincidence into causality. The Everyone button is not even available to all users yet — and to boot, it’s still a secondary piece of UI that most people won’t notice.
I think what you’re seeing is simply organically increasing growth rate via the network effect.
PREDICTION: Facebook is destine for social media domination. Twitter will become and also ran much like MySpace. Cody Brown did a great post on it a couple days ago – http://codybrown.name/
Twitter and Facebook are two different things, why are you comparing them?
“if it wasn’t bad enough…”
really? why is the success of something other than twitter so bad?
Because in the context of twitter, it is bad. Can you read?
Also, how can you compare the minutes on the two websites? Most of my time “on Twitter” is actually spent looking at a TwitterClient, which is basically unmeasured time. Facebook on the other hand does provide content that requires me to be on their site to use, so its no wonder people spend more time there.
Even percent growth comparisons between the two companies regarding minutes spent on their sites ignores the fact that spending time on the twitter site is not necessarily part of the core model of twitter, where it is more so for facebook. It would be like claiming Twitter is bigger for having more desktop applications that interface with its API.
Twitter and Facebook are not really competing in the same race! Except maybe Facebook is gradually creeping a little onto Twitter’s ground!
With all the media coverage twitter got, it should have had grown more than 6%.
Both services will stay for a long time, but twitter will lose the aura of a fresh, new and hyped service and growth will stagnate, while facebook becomes a internet jauggernaut as big as google (not in revenue though).
great article
Where is MySpace in all this mess? hahah you guys don’t write about it anymore…seems like picking up facebook / friendfeed keywords
Good point, what are the current #’s for MySpace?
I’d bet a percentage of Facebook’s traffic is fake. How does a service that is that big already grow so fast in a market that is already saturated? Seriously, who in the US does not know about Facebook? Hell, I could write a script that would get you all sorts of free traffic to be picked up by comScore. I’d like to take a look at their access logs…
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Facebook seems unstoppable.
Twitter has bigger problems then trying to compete with Facebook. First on my mind is hmmmm… How to monetize their site.
Until they have a reliable revenue stream, the same applies to Facebook.
The real explanation for twitter’s slow growth is that more people use twitter clients more often.
In fact, I expect the number of visits to twitter.com to go down over time.
Twitter is a service (=API) not a website and if you measure the website’s traffic you measure the wrong thing.
No. The real explanation is that few people find any utility in tweeter after the initial round of early adopters.
hey, another 200 million us visitors and twitter wont have to worry about facebooks us growth anymore!
It’s as simple as this: A user’s time is limited. Twitter and Facebook are competing for very similar use cases – social web entertainment.
I think Facebook does have a different philosophy from that of Twitter. I’m more interested in using Twitter, instant messaging, gmail contacts, social widgets, and picasaweb/flickr than messing around on Twitter. There’s just something about the simplicity of Twitter that I like. Besides, I use various websites for various reasons, I don’t feel that Facebook deserves that much of my time. Facebook makes me feel like I need to “manage” my Facebook profile and I don’t actually need that. But I have a Facebook account as people often send me links to photos or videos on Facebook, etc.
Facebook is simply better at keeping up and communicating with multiple unrelated groups of people.
Plus, you can just easily follow your favorite brands now (maybe even better with integrated media)
Twitter is doomed, and YouTube better look out too
Remarkable numbers.
Interesting!
Twitter cannot be compared to Facebook. It is an extremely simple service.
This is like comparing the popularity of a url shortneter to a search engine – meaningless.
I’m just glad they both exist. I like them both for different reasons.
I’m getting tired of the comparisons and the hype and drama about which is better, growing faster, gets more traffic.
I guess it creates sensational media and allows those who side with one or the other to voice their loyalty. At the end of the day, who really cares?
The only reason why Facebook sees Twitter as a threat (or more like an opportunity) is because of the fact that SNS services will always and never fails to hit stagnation point.
I’m sure most of you newbies here are Social Networking virgins and Facebook has been your 1ST ever Social Networking site you’ve participated in. I’ve been researching SNS sites since 2001, have accounts on at least 60 out of the 250 SNS sites out there and researched them over the years.
And let me tell you this, EVERY SNS service out there will:-
1) get petered out
2) reach stagnant point
3) close due to the next ‘big thing’
4) lose traction (Twitter has recently peaked and reached stagnation point and dwindling)
And all these start happening within the 3 year mark and if lucky, may stretch up till the 7 year mark.
So obviously having the Twitter like functionality within the walls of Facebook may be a good idea after all to pull in additional crowd to the site. In other words, they’re banking on the next ‘big thing’.. that is currently Twitter aka real time social updating.
I didn’t realize that I was actively participating in a war. Someone has to understand that eventually, people will realize that Facebook isn’t for adults
I have both. Strictly a FB user. I agree with David M. Looking at it as a business tool. There are many features to stay in touch and promote. There’s no need to shorten the url when posting. However, they do need to streamline with the search engines. I’m connected most of the time using the G1 browser. Can’t wait for the FB apps.
it’s good to see Facebook grow while they keep the site extremely well streamlined and functional. kudos to FB!
I think the reason behind it is that, Twitter is only to updates and exchange messages while facebook providing many features including apps that is why mostly people consider facebook over twitter.
You can’t compare the 2…….totally different and totally unique!
And Facebook has a much better search engine too