Statistics on Twitter’s Growth: Harnessing Twitter’s Reach for Your Business Needs

As part of their five year anniversary, yesterday Twitter blogged about the massive amount of growth they have experienced since inception. From the first tweet, through now well over a billion tweets, there is no denying Twitter’s growth. There are many ways to utilize Twitter for your business and harness its reach, depending on what your objectives are with the social platform.

Below are a few statistics Twitter released to illustrate its growth trends:

#tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees

• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

Are your customers hanging out on Twitter?

If so, at a minimum you should at least “listen” using tools such as Twitter Search. You want to be where your customers are, interacting with them. Although it’s easy to use Twitter as a broadcast channel, remember it’s important to add a human factor to your communications.

Happy Birthday Twitter from @erikabarbosa!

Image credit: Rosauraochoa