A couple weeks ago, Pingdom released some research suggesting that Twitter passed 1.2 billion tweets per month mark, averaging 39.5 million tweets per day in January.
What made these findings interesting was that Pingdom’s methodology covered “all tweets, including those made from third-party applications via Twitter’s API.” Twitter usage data has been a bit patchy in the past, and this meant that we were finally able to see the actual activity of the Twitter service as a whole.
It turns out though, that Pingdom might have been 10 million Tweets off the mark.
Yesterday, @kevinweil of the Twitter analytics team published a post about the service’s growth over the past three years, providing raw, spam-free numbers:
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)
If you like charts, then that growth looks something like this:
Stating the obvious, as Twitter’s popularity has grown as a comms channel, so too have the opportunities for brands to listen to, and connect with, customers. But for all the marketing triumphs that have taken place on Twitter, it seems there’s been customer service crises in equal measure.
Growth is surely a good thing but with 50 million Tweets per day, it also means that there is a lot of noise out there for brands (and their partner agencies) to make sense of.
And things are bound to get noisier… Let the fun begin.
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