A recent report released by analytics firm Hitwise, does not provide good news for Twitter. According to the report, the growth curve of Twitter has taken a fairly steep turn for the worst between July and October 2009.
There is a clear decline in the total number of visits over the last three months and a slight decline in the number of unique visitors to the site in the last month.
As far as the subject of Twitter competing with Facebook is concerned, quite contrary to the general expectation that Twitter may soon overtake Facebook, Twitter is actually way behind Facebook in the race, and seems to be losing ground.
While neither Compete.com nor Alexa.com’s numbers areprecise, they do give a very good general idea of trends, and in both cases, the trend for Twitter over the last month has been downward.
On October 24th Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer studied the number of U.S. Internet visits to both Twitter and Facebook. He found that while Facebook accounts for 6.1% of the market share, Twitter has only 0.14%.
Tancer also says that “At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus, referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per Twitter account is 1”.
The final admission that Twitter is not doing too well at present comes from none other than its CEO, Evan Williams, who told CNN, “It’s grown a little bit slower lately, but we have some things in the works that we think will change that.”
We can only wait and watch to see if that actually happens.
