At Scott Kirsner’s recent Momentum Summit, Trip Advisor CEO, Stephen Kaufer was asked to play a game.  Interviewer, Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners called the Game “College Money”.  Rodriguez explained that he would name a number of companies and Kaufer would say “yes” or “no” as to whether he’d bet his kids college money on that company’s success.

Yahoo – Yes
Microsoft – mmm, Yes
Facebook – Yes
Twitter – NO!

Rodriguez paused and asked again.

Twitter – Nope.
And again.
Twitter – No.

Each successive “No” seemed to be gonging death knell for everyone’s favorite microblogging site.  Kaufer seemed to cast doom on our rich, 140 character culture.   But why?  Kaufer simply smiled and shrugged and suggested that its utility would be short-lived.  Really?

It’s use among the social media set is practically ubiquitous.  Aside from its promotional value for brands (those brands which use it wisely), its capacity to empower knowledge-sharing is staggering.  The question it answers is no longer “What are you doing?” but “What do you know?”  Yet, Kaufer, a man who’s built a successful web company on the power of social engagement, suggests that he wouldn’t bet on its future.

Back in January of 2010, there were several charts and quite a bit of chatter pointing to the flatline of twitter’s growth.
It wasn’t until April 2010, however, that these charts were put in their proper perspective.  At Chirp, the annual Twitter Conference, there were some exciting revelations about the growth of twitter.  It seems that these harbingers of twitter doom hadn’t accounted for the number of people using third party apps to do their tweeting.  In fact, approximately 60% of all tweets originate in third party applications.  With that perspective, you can see that these charts don’t point to a flagging interest in twitter but rather an explosion of innovative usage.

If that weren’t answer enough, the Huffington Post published the following stats from Chirp:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.

• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.

• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.

• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)

• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.

• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.

• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.

• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.

In light of these usage statistics, we’ll have to very respectfully disagree with Mr. Kaufer on Twitter’s dim future.  It seems that our 140 character culture is here to stay, though it may evolve.  Viva la Twitter!

Photo by Pellaea

Tags: Social Media, twitter, usage stats

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 11:00 AM by MattC and is filed under Social Media ROI, The Terametric Scorecard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.