Twitter’s growth rate

Twitter grows 1043% in 3 months and it plateaus for a month!

Follow BB Creative on Twitter, click here

Twitter’s volume has gone up by 1300% from this time last year.  At the same time LinkedIn actually lost 400,000 visits last month. Could Twitter be stealing this audience? Is twitter the new place to network pushing out linked in?

Twitter also went through a tremendous growth spurt in the last few month because of some pop-culture mentions.  Aston Kutcher challenged Larry King/CNN to a race to get a million followers first.  Also Oprah started twittering and when Oprah twitters, so does everyone else!  These celebrity moves could have a lot to do with a huge surge in membership, but those folks don’t really post often.

I think a lot of the people who twitter often, are business user.  Meaning they use twitter at work, for work and promote their business.  These recent studies and research commonly have statistics like 60% of new sign-up in the US do not use the Twitter the following month (Recent research by Nielsen Online ).  Is it possible that these people are using Twitter for personal social purposes only and quickly lost interest?

The following is from a BBC news story on the results of a May 2009 Harvard study of 300,000 users: “Twitter Hype Punctured by Study” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8089508.stm).

• 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content
  (Compare this to a typical online social network where the top 10% of users account for only 30% of all production)
• Half of Twitter users post less than once every 74 days

Popularity: 3% [?]