Twitter traffic and the brand in general has been riding the crest of a wave for the last couple of years but the latest figures for traffic in October show a decline in traffic to the site itself (these stats do not take into account 3rd party apps or use through mobile devices). Twitter, the darling of world media is for the first time seeing some negative publicity wih high profile users like Miley Cyrus and Stephen Fry claiming to have quit the service and now today traffic numbers being announced that are less than stellar.
Traffic had been stagnant for the last couple of months with most growth coming from outside the USA but it is the first time that traffic has actually fallen and it must raise some serious concerns over the recent $1 billion valuation that Twitter raised funding at.
The good news is that there seems to have been a spike around Twitter launching their new lists feature in the last week but the bigger question is will Twitter continue to grow as it has done or has it reached it’s height and should the owners have cashed in around the time that Oprah joined and all the media frenzy was at it’s highest?
All of this data is captured by third parties and may not be 100% accurate but on a site with the sort of volume that twitter has you have to think they give a good indication of where things are at. Check out the graphs and let us know what you think yourself? A blip or a bigger problem?
Alexa
Hitwise
Twitter stops growing October 2009
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They’re interesting stats. I’ve been away for two weeks without any internet access and was literally debating with myself whether to go back on to twitter this morning. (I fell off the wagon and went on – that’s how I saw your link). I love all the stuff I can find out quickly on twitter and I have certainly gotten design work through it, but I’m going to be much more stringent about the time I spend on it. You can get sucked in easily and start looking at links to EVERYTHING. Major information overload. Maybe that’s why people are starting to back off a bit?
I believe this is connected to the raise of spammers on Twitter after it has become very popular. Also some missing features (RT, conversation threads etc) might be a problem.
I hope it is just a hickup but if guys at Twitter won’t do anything serious about spammers they might have a problem.
They probably need to evangelise it more and educate people what they can use Twitter for and change the “What are you doing?” question to something else, perhaps “What’s on your mind?” or “What did you find interesting?” as I believe their power is in realtime information share and search. People are more likely update their Facebook profile than Twitter with the answer on “What are you doing?”.
I have a feeling that twitter as it exists now has plateaued and will decline. Usage has not taken off outside of online professionals and commercial end users. Companies like Ryanair and Vodafone dipped their toe in the water and seemed to have stopped. People who experience negativity like Fry are also going to switch off- Twitter is a perfect platform for negativity and passive aggression from strangers (unlike Facebook). Its easy to see why Facebook is becoming the #1 social platform on the web. I advise online marketing clients of ours that by all means take a good look at twitter, but don’t be surprise if its completely forgotten about – in this form at least- in a year or two.
[...] in to the positive coverage. For the last 3 months Twitter has been getting a lot of coverage about dwindling user numbers and it was starting to attract a lot of bad press around the company for the first time. Most of [...]