Twitter has more than quadrupled its total audience over the last two months according to new data from comScore. Everybody knows that Twitter has been growing ridiculously, but this growth is astounding.
Compete data even showed that Twitter had surpassed the New York Times and Wall Street Journal sites in unique visitors. Here is the graph on that:
comScore’s graph shows the growth of Twitter from April 2008 to April 2009. You can see that it really starts to jump in February:
“Of course, this rush of new followers probably would not have occurred without rampant media exposure and an army of high-profile celebrity users,” says comScore’s Andrew Lipsman. “And getting featured by Oprah doesn’t hurt.”
Of course Twitter does still have that retention problem. Many people who keep hearing the word Twitter decide to give it a try only to find nothing about it that appeals to them. This could be for a variety of reasons, many of which were noted in the comments here.
“Much like a new product on the supermarket shelves, people are willing to give Twitter a taste to see if the experience matches the advertising (or in this case, the media buzz),” says Lipsman. “The question, of course, is how many of these trial Tweeters will convert into regular, long-term users.”
If I had to make a prediction, I would guess that this rapid growth will slow down before too long, but it will continue to grow. I think the retention rate will improve as people begin to realize the different things they can use Twitter for.
