Looks like Twitter’s exponential growth has fallen dramatically on a month-over-month basis. According to the web analytics company - Compete, Twitter’s unique visitors has increased by only 285,000 to close to 19.7 million from April to May 2009. Although the figure 285,000 seems high, however, when converted to percentage, it is just a 1.45% growth rate. Officially launched in March 21 2006, Twitter has emerged from just a simple SMS service which enables users to tell their friends ‘What are you doing?’ to one of the world’s most popular social networking platform. Without the help of notable web entreprenuers, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey and of course the deep-pocket venture capitalists, Twitter would not have succeeded.
The statistics from Compete shows that the influence and presence of both Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey on Twitter have attracted millions of fans to join the micro-blogging platform. In February 2009, Twitter’s unique visitors from the United States hovers at around 7.9 million. Surprisingly, two months later, it boosted to an astounding 19.4 million with an exponential growth rate of 145%!
Regarding the social platform’s slow growth, some analysts said that traffic to Twitter will continue to fall unless a miracle happens whereby an increasing number of celebrities start using Twitter. When its popularity starts to dip, the folks at Twitter may face a serious issue. According to a recent study, 40% of users quit within a month. Biz Stone and Co must solve this problem as soon as possible by finding reasons why users quit the service and make some improvements or else it would face dire consequences.
Despite its month-over-month growth rate falling dramatically, its total visits for May stands at 134.5 million, a 7% increase from April. Of course this is much lesser than the previous months but at least a 7% monthly growth is considered quite healthy.
On the other hand, California-based social networking giant Facebook has shown a steady growth of 8.54% from 104 million unique visitors in the United States in April to 113 million last month. Founded in 2004, the social networking website has more than 200 million active users with about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States. Currently, it is ranked third in Compete’s databases of millions of websites and has an Alexa rank of 4 which accounts for 17.2% of the total Internet’s traffic.
Facebook, the world’s most popular social platform, has been growing steadily over the years without any signs of negative growth (month-over-month basis). Despite its soaring popularity and ever-growing reach, the folks at Facebook are troubled over the serious problem of the hosting of billions of photos and videos uploaded by its users. Since it is free to use and does not even charge users when he or she reaches the storage limit, Facebook would have to foot the cost of the expensive servers all by themselves even with the current global recession not ending yet.
In my own opinion, Twitter’s growth will continue to slow in the next few months but as for Facebook, its unique visitors will increase steadily and one day may even beat search engine giant Yahoo.
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