More than one billion tweets are sent every 2-3 days across Twitter, which has become a social network of significant importance (to varying degrees) in every continent, and almost every country, around the world.

Absorbing all of those tweets is an impossible task, as there are simply too many of them to follow. But wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that you could see all of that Twitter activity, as it happened, in real-time?

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Yesterday morning at 10am I published a blog post for a client that encouraged that account’s Twitter followers to take part in a competition.

Essentially, all the followers had to do was retweet the blog post, which came with a convenient hashtag and personalised bit.ly link.

The competition ended at 1630 in the UK, and was a huge success. When the offer closed, the blog post had 830 retweets. And even though we announced a winner almost immediately, we’ve had another 100 since then.

I was hoping that this kind of activity – which was at a frenzied pitch for the first couple of hours – would see the hashtag reach Twitter’s trending topics. But while it made the top 10 in Manchester, and by all accounts flirted outside of this in London and the UK, we never actually made an official top ten.

I found this disappointing, but not unexpected. Twice in the last month or two I’ve had posts I’ve made on my personal account see over 500 retweets, and neither of these saw my moniker make any kind of appearance amongst Twitter’s most popular topics.

Various studies have been done on the sort of interest a topic needs to trend on Twitter, but from what I can see most of these are dated and hardly definitive.

Certainly, it seems obvious to me that even before the bulk of the citizens of the United States are awake and active on Twitter you need well above 1,000 retweets, likely in a very focused period of time, to have any chance of making Twitter’s top ten. And once the USA roars into life it takes a lot, lot more.

Which leads me to believe that barring a miracle Twitter’s trending topics is out of reach for most marketers.

Yes, anyone can theoretically fluke the top ten, which is full of fluff and nonsense half of the time. Major events like the deaths of the very famous are guaranteed to chart. And even beyond that, the merits of making this lofty peak are debatable once the spammers get their hands on a hashtag. I’m simply proposing that a planned campaign to trend on Twitter is very hard to guarantee, certainly unless you’re a very major brand or have the involvement (paid or otherwise) of some of the power-celebrities.

Which of course 99% of marketers do not. You can get creative with a tweet, but not that creative. Even the best legs benefit from a running start.

All of which of course explains why promoted trends and tweets are actually a very good idea. If only they weren’t so darned expensive – and thus exclusionary – to all but the people who probably don’t really need them in the first place.

(Image credit: Julia Roy.)

November, 2008 – Twitter reaches 1 billion tweets.

October, 2009 – Twitter reaches 5 billion tweets.

Sometime over the next couple of days, Twitter should pass the 10 billion mark, which is an incredible accomplishment in a relatively short period of time.

This is according to data provided by Popacular.com, which tracks all tweets via an almost mesmerising GigaTweet counter.

Last month, we reported how Twitter was now averaging close to 50 million tweets per day. GigaTweet has charts for that, too.

As well as per hour.

In case you’re wondering how they work this out, all tweets are conveniently tagged with their number, which is contained in the URL.

For example, this tweet is number 9,887,809,135.

Who will get tweet 10 billion? Just how many of these tweets are spam or ‘pointless babble‘? And how long would it take you to read them all?

More importantly, shouldn’t Twitter really give out some kind of prize?

(Hat tip to Diana Adams, her friend @cheth and Mashable.)

An interesting update over on the official Twitter blog, where analytics lead Kevin Weil looks at the growth of the network over the past three years in terms of numbers of tweets per day.

Kevin notes that all accounts identified as spam have been removed from this data, which makes the results even more impressive.

On a year-by-year basis, Kevin notes that Twitter has grown from just 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, to 35 million in 2009, and 50 million as of January this year.

Twitter has a habit of flat-lining pretty quickly after stellar growth, but given we’ve already seen a 43% rise in daily tweets in just a couple of months, and 200% since July, it doesn’t seem too fantastical to set a target of 100 million tweets per day before the end of the year. That’s 1,200 per second, if you’re counting.

Perhaps less impressively – assuming my estimations of 25 million active and bonafide users are accurate – that’s just four per profile, per day. Which equates to only two per day, at the current levels. If the active user numbers are as high as 75 million as some have suggested, that would mean just 1.33 tweets per day per person to hit the magic hundred. Given I do forty or so per day myself, I’m pretty sure that between us we can cope, even if a bunch of you continue taking a siesta.

Of course, if Twitter would actually release the active user data, that would make crunching these numbers just that little bit easier. All this guesswork is getting just a wee bit tiresome.