The Twitter DataBook - Introduction

What is Twitter?

What is Twitter? In its own words – from a collection of internal planning documents published by TechCrunch in July 2009 – "Twitter introduced a new form of communication to the world." The company envisions itself in part as a means of "discovering and sharing what is happening right now" and as "an index to my friends [sic] thoughts and I subscribe to that." It is both a social network and a real-time communication and information-sharing platform.

How Popular is Twitter?

During the last twelve months, the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com has grown from 3.1 million (September 2008) to 23.5 million (September 2009), an increase of 660%, according to Compete.com. Total visits during the same period expanded from 25.7 million (8.3 visits per user per month) to 144.7 million (6.1 visits per user per month). For context, Hitwise estimated that total U.S. visitor traffic across the 155 largest social networking sites as a group increased by only 62% over the 12 months ending September 2009.

Monthly unique visitor traffic to twitter.com according to Compete Inc.

Google Ad Planner estimated the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com during September 2009 was 21 million from the U.S. and 66 million worldwide.

An analysis of more than five million Twitter accounts by Sysomos Inc. in May 2009 estimated that 72.5% of Twitter users had registered for the service since the beginning of 2009; 22.7% had joined in March 2009 alone and 19.7% in April. User growth was propelled forward during the spring of 2009 in part by the highly visible Twitter activity of several celebrities, including Ashton Kucher (@aplusk), Larry King (@cnn and @KingsThings) and Oprah Winfrey (@oprah).

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