Twitter Experiences “Highest-Usage” Day, But Debate Rages On

Posted by Forrest Kobayashi on January 18th, 2010 7:19 PM

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As of late, many people have wondered whether Twitter is actually growing.

According to a post by TechCrunch last week, Twitter recently experienced their “highest-usage” day ever. A tweet by Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, first reported the news. The most important thing to note with the timing of the traffic spike is that there were not any major events that could have significantly impacted the tweet volume or the traffic.

According to Hitwise, a website used to track market share, Twitter ranked fifth among all social networking sites in the category over the past week, ranked by visits. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube—the top three over the past week in visits—account for 79.85% of the total market share. Fourth and fifth place Tagged and Twitter account for less than three percent combined.

TechCrunch attributes the growth to Twitter user loyalty as well as Twitter API usage. According to TwitStat.com, 20.70% of users update from the web (statistics taken from today, January 18, 2010). That means that just under 80% of users update from third-party clients, and it obviously has a tremendous impact on their traffic numbers. Since a significant amount of Twitter tweets are sent from mobile phones and third-party clients, it will continue to be fairly difficult to accurately gauge Twitter’s growth.

A brief look at these statistics shows that it is highly likely that Twitter is continuing to grow. If we assume that 80% of updates are not accounted for, then Twitter could be growing at a fairly high rate that people are failing to acknowledge.

The above graph, originally posted by John Borthwick, estimates the Twitter ecosystem to drive about three times the amount of traffic as Twitter’s web interface. After John reviewed his past-30-days analytics from bit.ly, he found that only about 10,000 of the 39,000 total clicks came from Twitter’s web interface, leaving a high number coming from third-party applications.

What are your thoughts on the way Twitter’s traffic is trending?

Angela Olsen

I can find the latest news about any topic on Twitter before it hits the mainstream media - or even the online blogs! All I have to do is click on my account and see what's going on at this moment in any part of the world. There is nothing currently that can top that kind of immediacy. As more and more people discover this rushing river of information just at the tip of their fingers, I think that Twitter will continue to grow. Also, it is too enticing to be part of the news with the ease of narrating events on the ground or uploading a video to Twitter. Those of us who watch events unfold can't resist adding our own point of view to these events.

However, I have noticed among my personal friends that those who are attracted to Twitter are those who are more socially adept in real life situations. It seems that some of the others seem to experience 'stage fright' when contemplating talking to a world-wide audience of complete strangers. That fact might limit the natural expansion of the Twitter following to a certain percentage of the population who is already comfortable in the social arena. It's a very different thing from writing a blog or playing a game with a few people.
marjorie_oszman_yowseryowser

The technology seems to slow down on high traffic day. I have a difficult time retweeting stuff and getting stuff out. More media pundits and personalities are being encouraged to use Twitter. I see new accounts everyday.

This is causing me to plan about how I conduct myself on Twitter because I am seeing more business coming on board and I wouldn't want them to think ill of me. But not too much, don't want to sacrifice the personality.

I'm still not certain about the traffic trending, except that it seems like everybody is out on the street right now. And it's a learning curve on how to operate in the Twitter environment.