Back in September we looked at a study which, somewhat controversially, suggested that 35.5 million of Twitter’s (at the time) 140 million active users were likely located in China, putting the country top of Twitter’s user league table, ahead of second-placed India, with the U.S. a distant third.

The numbers didn’t sit right with me, nor many of our readers, and with good reason, as Twitter access is heavily restricted on the Chinese mainland, with the country actively blocking the micro-blogging social network since 2009. And while many people around the world access Twitter secretly via proxies, the penalties in China can be so severe that, even in a country of 1.34 billion, tens of millions of people blatantly taking this risk seemed a little unlikely.

And that line of thinking might have some merit, as a new study has suggested that that 35.5 million estimation could be off by several magnitudes.

Read more

Since it first opened its doors to an unsuspecting public back in July 2006, Twitter has come a long, long way.

It took Twitter more than three years for the billionth tweet to be published on the network – now, that many tweets are submitted every 2-3 days by more than 140 million active users (growing at an astonishing million new accounts per day) across all age groups and demographics in nearly every major country around the world.

Read more

Twitter’s 32% increase in traffic in 2011 is enough to see the network leapfrog LinkedIn as the number two most-visited social network overall, behind Facebook, says TechVibes, touting data from Comscore.

Twitter’s traffic growth has been tops amongst all social networks for the past three years. The site saw 32.5 million visitors in July, and is now the 34th most-visited site in the U.S., leap-frogging the stagnant LinkedIn (ranked 36th).

Read more

It’s very easy to forget how quickly and (some would say) effortlessly social media has become an integral part of many of our lives. But roll back the clock just 10 years, and Twitter (2006), Facebook (2004) and even MySpace (2003) not only didn’t exist, but were yet to be imagined. As were their possibilities and potential.

This infographic from Search Engine Journal takes a look at the growth of social media over the last five years.

Read more

Sometimes it’s very easy to forget just how quickly the world changes, particularly with the all-conquering innovations that develop on the internet.

After all, it’s just five years ago that Twitter first opened its doors to an unassuming public, and nobody could have begun to imagine the impact that the network would make around the globe – culture to culture, person to person – in such a short space of time.

These incredible maps, created by Eric Fischer, use geolocation to show how both Twitter and photo-sharing service Flickr are spreading across the planet.

Read more

A nice summary over on the official Twitter blog that details how Twitter has grown since inception – and even in the last month.

Highlights include:

• It took Twitter a total of 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to reach one billion tweets. It now sees that number each and every week.
• When Michael Jackson died, Twitter set a record of 456 TPS, or tweets per second (I remember it well, as I was one of the first to break the news). Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day in Japan, Twitter raised this mark to 6,939 TPS.
• Twitter is now seeing an average of 460,000 new users signing up each day – or just under 14 million on a typical month. The record was set on Saturday, March 12, when 572,000 new profiles were added. At this pace, Twitter will double in size in just over a year.
• As I’ve documented before, Twitter now has 400 employees. Three years ago, it had 8.

Good, clean, interesting statistics. But as AllThingsD observes, once again Twitter has denied us the information that we desire the most – the total number of users. Or specifically, the total number of active users. Facebook is always very forthcoming with this information, so I guess we have to assume that either (a) Twitter’s numbers are never as good as we might expect, (b) they’re really into this whole mystery thing or (c) the user statisticians are trapped under something heavy.

Whatever the reason, it’s getting a little bit old. Part of me is hoping for a buyout just so we can get some actual data.

(Source: Twitter blog.)

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

New visitors to Twitter.com rose by just +1.07% for the month of April for a total of 21,514,898, with overall visits to the site falling by an eyebrow-raising -18.11% (147,418,997).

* Month-on-month, overall visits to the site are down some 33 million. We might have to take this with a pinch – Compete, who seem to be getting slower-and-slower to release data each and every month, had overall visits to Twitter for March at 161,903,421 the last time I wrote this report, and they’ve now changed this number to 180 million. If the former is correct, it’s still a pretty big drop, although nowhere near as serious.

However, Twitter.com has clearly reached a ceiling that requires something special to break through – possibly the extra functionality that @al3x hinted at before he moved on to pastures new.

Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a ‘topping-out’ process that could see more users – new and established – moving away from the Twitter home page towards desktop and mobile clients in greater numbers? The sharp decline in visits this month would indicate that this is already happening for veterans.

One wonders how many of these old-hands the iPhone – and possibly the official Twitter for iPhone app – have picked up and converted.

Meanwhile, Facebook added 2.53% of new visitors (135,375,036 visits) and +15.70% overall (3,165,316,934), which obviously contrasts sharply with Twitter.

We’ll have to look at next month’s data to see the full picture for Facebook, but at the moment it would appear that not only are people not leaving the network over privacy concerns – they’re actually more eager to sign up.

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

After February’s -9.63% dip, Twitter rebounded just +0.08% for March, registering 21,287,217 unique visits, and 161,903,421 overall.

The latter figure is up some 12.47%, which is encouraging, but a little strange. It would appear that while new users are possibly cooling to the platform (many people move on the more feature-packed clients after a period of time on the network, but everybody starts on Twitter.com), existing members are using Twitter.com in greater numbers. This, of course, is ideal for Twitter, but the continuing plateau in new registrations remains a source of some concern.

Moreover, it confirms that last month’s decline was not an aberration caused simply because of a shortened month. For some reason, since the January highs traffic to Twitter.com has fallen over 10 per cent, and stayed that way. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out over the next few months.

Facebook, which also fell in February, added another +3.28% uniques to 132,040,907, and 3,046,062,608 overall (+8.76%), just short of the peaks we saw in January of this year.

LinkedIn and MySpace also rallied, up +3.76% (14,725,669) and +6.25% (47,582,253) respectively.

Meanwhile, last month’s Friendfeed rebound appears to have been an error from Compete. In March, the network dropped -4.05% to just 467,946 unique visitors, which is a new low.

A report from Matt Sanford, the lead engineer for Twitter’s international team:

Today we are a global information network, with a robust developer ecosystem and a website available in six languages. Our users on Twitter are even more geographically diverse — we’re proud to report that over 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US. There are Twitter users in the large countries you’d expect, some smaller countries you might not expect (like the Vatican City) and even one in outer space.

Read more at the official Twitter blog.

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

Twitter traffic fell an eye-opening -9.63% in February, registering 21,303,254 unique visitors, and 143,947,420 overall (-5.01%).

Even accounting for a growing use in Twitter clients (which do not register at Compete), and February being a shorter month, that’s a pretty worrying statistic for Evan Williams et al, especially as they prepare their much-hyped advertising platform.

Facebook and LinkedIn also fell sizeably, down -4.32% and -8.30% respectively. Overall visits at Facebook dipped -2.51% to just over 2.8 billion.

MySpace took the biggest hit, losing -11.52% of unique visitors.

Elsewhere, Friendfeed rallied an impressive +71.79%, registering 858,703 uniques, its highest point since August 2009.

Assuming these figures are accurate (and remembering that they predominately reflect US data and visits to .coms), it’s a very mixed bag indeed, and possibly of concern for the larger social networking platforms. It’ll be interesting to see if February’s figures are an anomaly, and all sites bounce back in March, or whether we are witnessing the beginning of a more significant downtrend across all of social media.