14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is reportedly heading for a huge growth, which is exactly what investors need to hear, if the way they reacted following the weak user growth from the first trimester of the year is any indication.
According to a new report from eMarketer, Twitter will have 300 million users worldwide in 2016 and will reach 400 million by 2018.
This all sounds great, but it should be noted that the user growth has actually slowed down some on a year-over-year basis. Furthermore, previous predictions indicated that Twitter should have already reached the 400-million milestone last year. If eMarketer is right, then it’s going to take Twitter five extra years to reach the goal.
The company announced that it had 255 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2014, over 50 million more than it did a year before.
Even so, if the company is to grow anymore in the years to come, it will do so by gaining users from outside the United States.
“Growth for Twitter is heavily concentrated in emerging markets. India and Indonesia will see the most consistent increases of Twitter users throughout our forecast period, both experiencing well above 50% growth this year. Twitter user growth in the US is maturing, and by 2015, eMarketer estimates that Twitter's growth will taper off into single digits,” the study shows.
According to the same research, the number of Twitter users in the Asia Pacific area has already eclipsed those in North America and Western Europe by a wide margin, a trend that will continue over the years.
“In 2014, the Asia-Pacific region will account for 32.8% of all Twitter users, compared with 23.7% in North America, eMarketer estimates, and by 2018, Asia-Pacific will more than double North America’s share, breaking the 40% mark in terms of worldwide market share. If China is on the Twitter map by that point, that share is likely to be significantly higher,” the study reads.
Twitter’s stock has been hit quite hard by news of the weak user growth. The company has tried to show everyone that the platform is more than the number of users it has, but it hasn’t really been working well.
It should be noted, though, that Twitter is a completely different platform than Facebook, despite whatever efforts the company has been making to make user profiles look similar to those on Zuckerberg’s social network. This means that it won’t gain users at the same speed or in the same amounts.