Twitter’s traffic has been growing at incredible rates the past few months due to mass adoption and coverage by the media as well as celebrity endorsements. According to comScore data, traffic in terms of unique visitors at Twitter.com alone (not including traffic from Twitter apps/clients) increased by ~95% for the month of March. Compete’s traffic growth value for unique visitors in March (~76%) was similar. This morning however, Compete released its latest data for the month of April which suggests that the booming traffic growth rate that Twitter was experiencing is slowing. Compete reports that Twitter traffic for the month of April was increased by ~39% from March; impressive but not rivaling the fantastic growth rate Twitter obtained from the previous month.
Incredible Twitter Growth Rate of Monthly Unique Visitors Diminished
Confirmation That Twitter Is A Fad?
So what does this slowing of traffic growth mean for Twitter? Could all the naysayers rantings that Twitter’s a fad be true? Of course not, Twitter’s for real and it’s hear to stay. If you don’t understand that, you’re either not a Twitter user or you just can’t see the real value of Twitter. The reduced traffic growth is certainly natural. While it’s very impressive to hear of 100% increases in traffic growth for a month, it’s impossible to maintain such spectacular numbers over several months. Despite the declining growth rate, a 39% increase in traffic is still quite an accomplishment. With that jump, Twitter leaped from the 47th largest site on the internet within the U.S. to being the 25th largest and receiving over 125 million visits.
Facebook Is Twitter’s 2nd Largest Referrer
Interestingly, Compete reports that Google and Facebook are the top two sites referring traffic to Twitter. The fact that Google is the number one referring site (10.01%) is not surprising given Twitter’s latest optimization to pull in top rankings for peoples names on Google. In contrast, I was a little surprised to see Facebook as the number two referring website (9.69%) for Twitter. Facebook has clearly been trying to mimic Twitter through its implementation of status updates and its redesigns. Despite all the efforts to keep its users within the app ladened confines of their walled garden, Facebook is obviously unable to do so.
What’s Twitter’s Greatest Weapon To Ensure Growth?
Perhaps a big part of Twitter’s traffic growth is it’s clever use of the shortened urls. This might explain as to why Facebook is one of Twitter’s top referring sites. Many Twitter users import all their Twitter messages into Facebook as status updates which usually contain a shortened url. Hence using this method, Twitter is effectively able to lure traffic away from Facebook. Since Facebook is a closed community in which you usually have to know the person in order to see their status updates, Facebook won’t be able to harness this strategy for itself and stem the outflow of users.
Will Twitter Soon Surpass, Dethrone Digg?
It’s likely that Twitter will see another 30%+ rate of growth for May enabling it to secure over 25 million unique visitors. If this growth trend holds, Twitter will break in the top 20 most visited sites in the U.S. by the end of the summer and surpass Digg. Give it another year of steady growth and we just might see Tweetmeme, whose traffic just cleared 1.6 million uniques (+337%) for this month, dethrone Digg as the reigning king of social news.
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I also meant to add in there that a ton of Twitterers use 3rd party apps like Tweetdeck, etc.
Oh, and Tweetmeme is beating out Twitter at it's own search engine development!
Twitter/Share/BookmarkWell, site hits for Twitter aren't necessarily solid stats. Because of the fact their API is open, many people either log on with their phones or TweetDeck. It's some people that haven't been to the actual website in months.
Wow exciting times! It will be great to watch how this thing all plays out, I think the Twitter engine is running for another year before it hits any kind of peak. It sort of reminds me of back in 2005 when the buzz for Facebook was around but people weren't quite sure. Then around 2007, if you're not on Facebook then you're missing out.
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