According to compete.com, May was a trend-bucking month in the life of one of everybody’s favourite websites.
A lot of attention in the last 12 months has focused on the rapid rise of Twitter, which has taken over from Facebook as most-zeitgeisty most-talked-about “Web 2.0″ ’social’ site. And the rise has been rapid: consistent monthly growth from just 1.7m monthly visitors a year ago to nearly 20m visitors now.
So it’s interesting to read the latest stats, which show that Twitter’s meteoric growth suddenly stalled in May:
| May 2008 | April 2009 | May 2009 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Users | Users | % growth since May 2008 | Users | % growth since April 2009 | |
| 1.7m | 19.4m | 1041% | 19.7m | 1.5% | |
| 31.9m | 104.1m | 226% | 113m | 8.5% | |
So, suddenly we have Twitter growing not-at-all (well, 1.5%) in May, while Facebook adds another 9 million users – half of the entire Twitter user-base – in the same month. (These are unique web visitors, not registered users, by the way).
Now this could be an oddity to do with the way that compete.com collects its figures … except that Quantcast shows similar results. So we do need to pay attention to them.
And it could be that many people don’t visit the Twitter site directly, instead preferring to use tools such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc … but that would have been the same situation last month. While that is a perfectly valid argument for saying that compete.com and quantcast.com, by only tracking site visitors, underestimate the use of Twitter, it doesn’t explain the sudden stalling in May. Plus, of course, the same argument applies – albeit to a lesser extent – to Facebook, with many people using Facebook applications on their iPhone and Blackberry phones. In both cases, how many of those users will never visit the site (Twitter or Facebook) itself over the course of a month? I would suggest that most of them will, at some point, so they will have been included in the stats shown above.
So, is this a one-month blip? Or does it show that the Twitter story has been over-hyped, and the reality of its future place in the world of social software is not quite as rosy as many people believe? Well, we won’t know until next month, of course.
But let me leave you with this related thought: Twitter’s monthly retention rate – that is, the percentage of people who, having signed up, are still using Twitter a month later – is down at just 30% to 40%. When Facebook and MySpace were at the same stage in their life – the first phase of sudden explosive growth – their retention rates were double that. Even today Facebook’s monthly retention rate is around 70%. So of the 5.5 million users that Twitter gained during April (the month before our ‘blip’), it can only expect to keep around 2 million of them for more than a few weeks; whereas of the 13 million users that Facebook added during April, it can expect to keep about 9 million of them. And that sort of retention rate means that Twitter will top out its market penetration at about 10% of the potential userbase. For what its worth, Facebook already has about 7% of the world’s internet population as regular users, and nearer to 13% already have an account. (Source: eWeek)
June 11, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Good summary. One of the things that many of the surveys on Twitter miss is that most people register online and then begin using alternative tools to access the stream (mobile, Air clients, other websites) which cuts down in the direct hits Twitter.com gets. Facebook doesn’t fit this model as the average user here uses the web interface almost exclusively.