How many twitter users are there? 12/2009

“How many twitter users are there,” you ask? eMarketer estimates 2009 twitter users will number 18 million. This amounts to ~11% of the total Internet population. An exact number of users is difficult to establish, however. User estimates are developed from (traffic count) – unique visitors to twitter.com. Many people access twitter not from the twitter.com website but from 3rd party applications (76%) and mobile phones (4%) that connect to individual twitter accounts – bypassing the website altogether. In addition, it is common for people to have multiple twitter accounts to represent personal, business and client interests. Therefore, precise user counts are challenging to calculate.

Perhaps a more interesting question, short of asking twitter to divulge their actual customer figures, is “how does twitter website traffic compare to other formidable social media giants?” Easy. Let’s consult www.compete.com to compare 1 year visitor numbers for twitter.com with facebook.com and myspace.com.

In October 2009, unique visitors numbers were:

Facebook = 128,940,004 (+188.67% from 1 year ago)
Myspace = 49,903,567 (-9.18% from 1 year ago)
Twitter = 23,042,455 (+577.92% from 1 year ago)

So, next time you ask google, yahoo or bing “how many twitter users are there” – consider that the answer to that question is multi-dimensional and fraught with circular logic. Then, just go to hootsuite.com and start following people. Most people follow back Oh, and remember to follow @usable_brand