The microblogging site has released a number of new features to counter the slump

Nov 13, 2009 14:41 GMT  ·  By
Twitter has released a number of new features to counter the dwindling traffic numbers
   Twitter has released a number of new features to counter the dwindling traffic numbers

Twitter looks to be as popular as ever, judging by all the attention it's been getting, but for several months traffic numbers in the US have been stalling and they've actually dropped in October from the previous month, going from 20.9 to just 19.2 million, according to comScore numbers. Traffic has been flat since summer and this is starting to look worrying for the microblogging service.

On a year-on-year basis, Twitter growth looks very solid at 1,271 percent. In fact, it has lost more visitors from September to October than it managed to attract for the entire month of October 2008, 1.7 million versus 1.4 million. However, after huge growth for about three months in spring, the traffic numbers remained flat. This is just for the US though, elsewhere Twitter is growing at a steady pace with 58.4 million visitors in September. And the traffic numbers are just for the website, Twitter's entire audience is estimated to be much bigger since more than half of the users connect via mobile or desktop clients.

Twitter has even acknowledged the slump, but said that the new features should counter the slowdown. And with the big number of announcements and new features coming from Twitter lately, it may just do that. A couple of weeks ago it introduced the Lists feature which was universally herald as a great addition, becoming very popular in a very short amount of time. Just a while ago, it also introduced the new retweet system to a wider audience, only to pull it after less than a day. The controversial feature is still MIA, but Twitter is confident that the new system will prove successful.

Equally important, perhaps even more so, Twitter recently announced search deals with both Microsoft and Google, which will include results from the microblogging service in their searches. The deals should drive more people to the service, which means precious revenue for the service. Finally, it has also revealed a partnership with professional social network LinkedIn and the results are already being felt. The social network says that, in just a few days, status updates on LinkedIn have increased in frequency by 25 percent and that every minute as much as 200 users were linking together their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. It certainly has been a busy month at Twitter and it remains to be seen if all this activity translates into new users.