14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is big, not Facebook big, but enough to be a serious force in social networking. But, while everyone knows that it's big and there are some, rather rough, estimates about how many people use it every month, Twitter has been keeping quiet on the matter, until now. No, it's not saying how many users it has just yet but it has released numbers relating to the usage, specifically, how many tweets are created every day and the figure, 50 million, is impressive.
"Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day - that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)," Twitter revealed.
The numbers show Twitter’s explosive growth with each year blowing past the previous one. In just two months in 2010, the number of tweets grew from 35 million to 50 million so, while it may not be adding users like it used to, it is seeing increasing engagement from the existing ones. Facebook gets about 60 million status updates per day so, at least in this respect, Twitter is competing rather well with the social network giant.
Of course, Twitter still isn't saying how many people are sending out those tweets so that number is just as speculative as it has been before. The latest data from ComScore shows that there are 75 million visitors to the Twitter domain so adding up the number of people using desktop or mobile apps to connect, which may be as much as 50 percent of the entire Twitter user base, the actual number of people using Twitter may very well be above 100 million.
As Twitter's Kevin Weil explains, the number of tweets moving through the system is several times bigger than the tweets created every day. "Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned."
