Twitter reasserted itself this week with the publication of two pieces of data designed to blow people’s minds and a rumor that should send a little quiver of excitement up your leg (if you like that sort of thing).
Data point #1: Twitter is currently processing 50 million tweets per day. That’s an average of 600 per second, and it excludes tweets from identified spam accounts. I’ll say it again so it sinks in: fifty million. That compares to 2007 when people were only tweeting 5,000 times a day. 2009 saw a 1,400% increase alone. This is a crazy rate of growth and goes some way to combat those people who have cast doubt on Twitter’s ability to grow its user base beyond the enthusiasts. If you like charts (and which of us doesn’t? Be still my heart) see below.
Data point #2: Only 50% of tweets are in English. Paris-based Semiocast released a report in which they analyzed 2.8 million tweets gathered over a three-day period earlier this month. Japanese accounted for 14%. Portugese at 9% reflects Twitter’s penetration into Brazil, while Malay at 6% is the result of Twitter’s partnerships with mobile providers in Indonesia and Malaysia. The remaing 21% of tweets are composed of a further 37 different languages identified by Semiocast.
These two pieces of data are enough to whet the appetite of marketers everywhere, but the main meal may well be served at SMSX in Austin next month when rumors say that Twitter may launch it’s own ad platform, even though the Twitter executive whose comments reinforced the rumor has tried to walk them back with the zen-like quote, "“Speculation = timing, imminence, details. Truth = thinking, planning, eventuality.”
We’ll see what happens but if Twitter does start running ads we can expect a new feeding frenzy as advertisers and arbitrageurs try to find the value in the Twitter audience. Good times.
