Twitter has always suffered an image problem and is not usually taken very seriously by the general public. Its name doesn’t help with some people even saying that ‘Twitter is for twits’. Despite this glamor and brand problem this has not held back its growth after its humble origins and launch in 2006. 
Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 225 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet” and its 140 character limit keeps the messages short and simple.
Its attraction as a social web media platform is maybe in its simplicity and real time messaging that enables breaking news and information to hit the web instantly without filters and censorship.
30 Terrific Twitter Facts and Figures
- Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year.
- Twitter’s origins lie in a “day long brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.
- The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006
- The original project code name for the service was ‘twttr‘, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by the name of the social media image website ‘Flickr’ and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.
- The team finally settled on the name ‘twitter‘, which means ‘chirps from birds’ in essence ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’
- The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
- It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007
- In 2008 there were only 3 million registered users
- In 2008 there were only 1.25 million tweets per day
- Jan 2008 there were only 8 employees
- In 2009 or 2 years ago Twitter had 8 million registered users
- In 2011 there are now over 400 employees
- 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
- 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
- There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
- A Forrester report revealed that “Twitterers are the connected of the connected, overindexing at all Social Media habits. For example, Twitterers are three times more likely to be Creators (people who create and share content via blog posts and YouTube) as the general US population” (source Forrester report “Who Flocks to Twitter”)
- 3 years, 2 months and 1 day…the time it took from the first tweet to the billionth tweet.
- It now takes one week for users to send a billion Tweets.
- In March 2010 the average number of tweets people sent per week was the the 350 million.
- 140 million is the average number of tweets people sent per day in February 2011
- 177 million tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
- When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 there were 456 tweets per second (TPS)…a record at that time.
- The current TPS record is 6,939 tweets per second set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day
- 572,000 is the number of new accounts created in one day (March 12, 2011)
- 460,000 is the average number of new accounts per day created in February, 2011
- 182% is the increase in number of mobile users over the past year.
- In March 2011 there are an estimated 225 million users
- 25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
- 100 million new accounts added on Twitter in 2010
- The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010
What other interesting Twitter facts and figures have you heard about?
Update:
Osama Bin Laden Tweet Stats
- Highest Sustained Tweet Rate Ever During President Obama’s Speech On Osama bin Laden (that is 12.4 million tweets per hour or 27.9 million tweets in just 2 hours and 35 minutes)
- 4,000 Tweets per second at beginning and end of President Obama’s Speech
Sources:
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