Data Monday: Twitter Usage

by May 10, 2010

It's been a long time (August 2009 to be precise) since I summarized Twitter's usage and growth. So, here are some updated statistics on the micro-blogging service:

  • Twitter has 105.8 million registered users. It gets 300,000 new users a day and receives 180 Million Unique visitors a month. (source)
  • Users now send out more than 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network. (source)
  • In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day. In 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day. In 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day. (source)
  • Twitter posted gains of 45% Year over Year gains in Unique Users in the United States. (source)
  • More than 60% of Twitter users are outside America. Back in June of 2009 (three years into Twitter's existence) less than 45% of people using the service were non-U.S. citizens. By September 2009, Twitter had reached the tipping point, and 50% of users were in the U.S., 50% elsewhere. (source)
  • On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. The most common friendship distance on Twitter is 4.67 - and if you visit all of your friends and friends of friends up to a distance of five steps, chances are that you will see about 83% of all Twitter users. (source)
  • Developers are making 3 billion requests a day through the Twitter APIs. 75% of all Twitter traffic comes from their API. If you look at the volume alone, that’s over 30,000 updates, timeline requests and searches per second. (source)