Is Twitter Already On Its Way Down?
3rd November 2009
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.
Graphing Twitters Decline on Compete.com
The graph above, taken from Compete.com shows 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, as can be seen in the graph below:
Comparing Twitter’s Decline to Facebook ’s rise, based on Alexa traffic ranks
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.
Tags: facebook, social media, social-news, twitter
7 Responses to “Is Twitter Already On Its Way Down?”
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Discussion on social networks & blogs
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Exout_Firenze : 4 November 2009 at 8:41 am
Secondo un report di Hitwise per #Twitter sarebbe cominciato il calo (in inglese) http://ow.ly/z66t Is
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Paid Twitter Accounts To Debut This Year | AccuraCast Search Daily News : 30 November 2009 at 10:38 pm
[...] users to 7 million between February 2008 and February 2009 (according to Nielsen Online), its growth has now slowed down, at least in North [...]
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This data is pretty misleading. Although this is only my opinion, the more visitors become familiar with Twitter and use it further, the higher chance will be that they will use an application such as TweetDeck or Seismic. A better way would be to note the number of tweets, or API calls. It wouldn’t be a direct comparison to Facebook in this respect, but there aren’t the range of apps available for Facebook as there are for twitter.
Here’s another chalk mark alongside the lack of accuracy in this data plus we’re comparing Facebook & Twitter (and on Compete & Alexa) Do you prefer Apples or oranges, people?
What if Twitter is “already on its way down?” Why is that? What does this mean?
First of all, why the obsession with growth? I’m concerned that Evan Williams has “things in the works that will change” slow growth. Does this mean that expansion is more important than simply providing a simple, solid tool that works. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Secondly, I believe the platform still has a way to go before it matures. Twitter is still relatively young and its user demographic may well have been affected by the influx of users having heard about it in the mainstream media this year (think CNN, BBC et al.) As the drive-by pop users find the next new thing, attention whores realise nobody’s listening to them because they have nothing of value to say and the spammers & link pimps only follow eachother then Twitter should reach a stable base.
But, as you say, we can only wait and see what happens.
Think this data is misleading as well, twitter has not hit critical mass yet…
I dont think the stats of this blog is accurate enough.Common you also cant compare both this because of their different perspective business areas!Facebook is more like a socialising tool in common.On the other hand Twitter is more into sharing business and new methods which is like introducing businesses.Its only my view!
While traffic numbers on Twitter alone might not paint a full picture, there is more and more evidence that the buzz around Twitter is fading, and along with it, the number of new users signing up is dropping steadily.