Despite its die-hard loyal user base, Twitter has been doing nothing but rubbing its fans up the wrong way for the last 12 months.
Whether its been the adoption of a dreaded algorithm, a mooted 10,000 character increase, the killing of its share counts, the pointlessness of ‘Moments’, heck even changing its ‘favourite’ button from a star to a heart was a massive thing, there’s a good chance that if you log-in to Twitter you’ll find people kicking-off about Twitter.
Much of this is down to the very fact that its users, especially its long-term ones who rode the crest of its initial popularity, are so loyal to the channel and don’t want to see it mutated beyond its unique purpose: serving concise sound-bites and sharing links in real-time.
But as Twitter deals with a stagnant user growth, partly due to a trend away from public social to private messaging, partly because Twitter is difficult to master for new adopters, the company has to try new things in order to stay relevant.
Today sees our second ever weekly #ClickZChat, where the good people of SEW and ClickZ take to Twitter to ask our expert friends and followers about a particularly burning digital marketing related issue.
Last week, we discussed whether or not brands have reached peak content and is it possible to cut through the noise? You can read everyone’s comments in the round-up post: have we reached peak content?
This week we’ll be talking about social media and the ‘death of Twitter’ in particular, so please join us at 12pm EST (5pm UK) on Wednesday 6 April.
As preparation for the discussion, I’ve pulled together as many stats relating to Twitter as I could possibly find, paying particular attention to its ‘rise and fall’.
Please note: many of (Read more...) stats were published in a ClickZ article by Leighann Morris from last year, and I have updated the numbers wherever possible.
Active users
If you go by Twitter’s official numbers, by December 2015 Twitter had 320m monthly active users.
80% of Twitter are active users on mobile.
79% of Twitter accounts exist outside the US.
[source: Twitter]
However as reported by CNN, in February 2016 Twitter announced that it has lost 2 million users in the last three months of 2015.
This compared to a year earlier when Twitter’s customer base only grew by just 6%.
So Twitter ended 2015 with 305 million active users. By contrast, Facebook has 1.6 billion and Instagram surpassed Twitter in September, growing to 400 million users.
There are 391 million Twitter accounts with no followers.
Tweets sent
500m tweets are sent per day.
From Twitter’s launch in 2006 and until 2009, the volume of tweets approached a 1,400% gain in daily volume year to year and around 1,000% gain in yearly volume.
By mid 2010 the rate of growth slowed down to below 100% gain in yearly volume in 2012.
Today, the volume of tweets is growing at around 30% per year.
[source: internetlivestats.com]
Demographics
23% of all online adults use Twitter (a proportion identical to the 23% of online adults who did so in September 2014).
Internet users living in urban areas are more likely than their suburban or rural counterparts to use Twitter. Three-out-of-10 online urban residents use the site, compared with 21% of suburbanites and 15% of those living in rural areas.
Twitter is more popular among younger adults — 30% of online adults under 50 use Twitter, compared with 11% of online adults ages 50 and older.
Twitter’s proportion of daily users remains unchanged from 2014 at 38%.
The number of online adults who say they use Twitter has grown 7% since 2012 – but compared with other platforms, this is pretty slow growth.
[source: Pew Research Centre]
In July 2015, Twitter had 87.89 million unique visitors from the United States, down from 89.2 million visitors in April 2015:
[source: Statista]
Twitter’s value
Despite losing users and struggling with growth, Twitter is still making impressive amounts of money…
Twitter’s annual revenue in 2015 amounted to more than $2.22 billion US dollars, up from $1.4 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year.
Twitter’s worldwide advertising revenue this year is valued at $2,444 million.
That being said, Twitter’s stock price hit its first ‘all-time low’ in August 2015, slumping to 5.6% to $29.27, pushing Twitter’s market value below $20 billion.
[source: Statista]
Analysts believe it will have to fall a further $10 billion for any tech giants to seriously consider any kind of approach. And that may not be far off…
Twitter’s stock price has slumped further from $29.06 in October 2015 to just over $17 (as of April 2016).
October 2015:
April 2016:
Twitter hit its new record all-time-low share price in February 2015 with just $14.31.
As Chris Lake suggested in his 17 things Twitter can do to transform its fortunes, Twitter is now valued at around the $12bn mark and that, “For a company that should post revenue of at least $2.3bn for 2015, its market price will be whetting the appetites of prospective acquirers.”
And finally…
The most retweeted tweet on Twitter is still the Ellen Degeneres Oscars selfie from the beginning of 2014, which has now been retweeted more than 3 million times:
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
Do you believe Twitter has a future? We’d love to hear your opinions so please join us for #ClickZChat.
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