The Phenomenal Growth of Twitter for Those Living Under a Rock

@Reader: Twitter has grown at such a phenomenal rate that it has become an undeniable force in the social media arena. Since its inception till date, Twitter has seen an approximate 50 million increase in the number of Tweets made per day and that is equivalent to a staggering 600 tweets released per second. Most brands and companies are already aware of the potential that is Twitter. However, for those who for some reason are still hesitant or are cooking up excuses to not go on Twitter, read on to find out about the phenomenal growth of Twitter and what this might mean for you, as a brand or company.

(You can also read this and this, but let’s move on to look at Twitter’s phenomenal growth.)

Charting Twitter’s Growth

Barracuda Labs recently released a trend report [PDF] on Twitter after analyzing 19 million user accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account’s overall activity level.

Most significantly, Barracuda has arrived at the conclusion that more people are using Twitter actively while currently active users are expressing increased activity levels. Being “active” essentially means that users are following more user accounts, users in turn are being followed back by more user accounts and more often and users are also tweeting more.

Tweet Count graph from the Barracuda report.

The increased number of active users has been evidenced by a notable 40% decrease in the number of people who have 0 followers. On the other hand, there was also saw a 20% increase in the number of Twitter users following at least 1 person within the same period.

Similarly, active users have increased their activity levels as shown by a 30% increase in the number of people having more than 10 followers. There was also a parallel 17.6% increase in users following more than 10 people within the same period.

There was also a notable 8% decrease in the number of inactive accounts between June to December 2009. This is mainly attributed to the mobility that Twitter offers its users – tweets can be sent on the go whether it is by one’s mobile phone, mobile web or via text messages.

Twitter Craze Driven By Working Adults

At this juncture, perhaps it is also pertinent to understand the driving forces behind this trend such that we may be able to determine how this will in turn affect how brands communicate with their customers.

NielsonWire has tracked the demographical distribution of Twitter users based on a NetRatings panel of 250,000 U.S. internet users. It was determined that Twitter’s reach to 10.7% of all active internet users by June 2009 was achieved despite a lack of widespread adoption by the under 25 age group. In February 2009, the largest age group on Twitter was between 35 – 39 with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising of almost 42% of the site’s audience.