14 DAY TRIAL // When almost one fifth of all Internet users are using a site you'd think that the growth potential is pretty much exhausted and expect the growth rate to slow down. But, not only is Facebook not slowing down, it's actually speeding up, gaining visitors at an accelerating pace and, in fact, the social network grew twice as fast as Twitter in the US last month.
According to data from comScore, Facebook reached 87.7 million unique visitors in the US in July, a 14 percent rise over the previous month. In the same period Twitter only grew 6 percent to 21.2 million unique visitors in the US, about one million more than in June. Facebook on the other hand attracted 10 million new visitors in just one month. The social network is now the fifth most visited website in the US, having passed Fox Interactive Media (MySpace, Photobucket and a number of Fox video sites), which managed a combined 80.9 million.
Just six months ago Facebook was the tenth largest site in the country and, at this rate, it should pass AOL this month and then be ready to take on the big three, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Worldwide it is already at number four as AOL has a much smaller presence outside of the US. Twitter on the other hand reached 44.5 million worldwide in June and, overall, is growing faster than in the US.
There are some issues with the numbers as they may not be a very accurate measure of how many people have actually used the services. Many regular Twitter users connect with desktop or mobile clients and those visits aren't accounted for by these stats. At the same time many sites now have Facebook Connect integration and those visits also aren't counted. Still, even if the absolute numbers aren't exact, the overall trend is likely to be very similar.