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Twitter has exploded this year, but Twitter have never released hard statistics on their membership base, unlike its rival Facebook. So much speculation has gone one in the media about Twitter, so here we’ve compiled the most relevant and verified statistics on Twitter users.
According to Rachel Bremer, Twitter’s European communications manager, the online social networking and microblogging service is now processing 230 million tweets a day, a number that has increased by over 100 per cent since the beginning of the year.
Twitter expect to add 26 million active users between now and the end of the year.
Twitter’s monthly unique visits has increased by 60% to more than 400 million from 250 million at the start of the year, says Google Analytics.
However, 40 per cent of Twitter’s users with an active profile, which they define as “anyone who logs into Twitter once a month” choose to observe rather than actively take part, by tweeting. Saying you’re active and actually being active are two very different things. And this is where commitment-shy Twitter encounter a problem with accurately quantifying the amount of people contributing to their success. Perhaps this is why Twitter are so tight-lipped when it comes to statistics.
In June of this year, Pew Research Centre released statistics indicating that 13 per cent of online Americans use Twitter, a rise of five per cent from the previous November, just three months after Jack Dorsey’s brainchild celebrated its fifth birthday.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Umpf asked 2,400 adults in the United Kingdom what social networking platforms they used. They found that approximately 32 per cent of the adult population use Twitter – that’s a whopping 15.5 million people across the UK. That figure seems a bit high, and other sources claim it’s more like 6.5 million UK users.
Twitter is already snuggly bedded into countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom but it is the Middle East where the true potential lies. Apart from serving as an additional means of personal communication, Twitter is used by a whole range of groups and individuals, covering the entire gambut of society.
It cannot be denied that national protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, collectively known as the Arab Spring relied heavily on social media and technologies like Twitter in the early stages to accelerate the social protest.
News organisations, such as the BBC, CNN and the increasingly influential Arabic network Al-Jazeera all have popular Twitter feeds and more often than not Twitter is chosen over traditional media as a person’s primary news source.
Information flowed more freely to the protestors and to the rest of the international community but it is important to remember that what enable the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, was the bravery of the people who took to the streets knowing they might be punished for expressing their views.
Twitter’s flexibility of use is clear for all to see, and that’s why its popularity has just mushroomed this year. From following Lady Gaga, who reigns supreme on Twitter with over 14 million dedicated Monsters, to following your countrymen into battle to extract freedom from long-serving dictators, Twitter can be your own personal newspaper.
Are you on Twitter? Write your handle in the comments for others to follow.
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