Twitter has long had credibility issues, and the public generally doesn’t take it seriously. Others have even gone so far as to argue that its moniker, “Twitter is for twits,” works against it. Notwithstanding these issues with its image and reputation, the company has continued to expand since its humble beginnings and 2006 launch. There are 30 amazing nuggets of information about Twitter.
Since then, Twitter’s user base has grown exponentially; the service now processes over 800,000 daily search requests and 65 million daily tweets. It has been called the “SMS of the Internet” due to its emphasis on concise, easily understood communications because to its strict character restriction of 140.
Its appeal as a social media platform lies, perhaps, in the fact that it is so easy to use and allows users to send and receive messages in real time.
Stunning Statistics About Twitter: 30 Facts
- The board members of the podcasting startup Odeo attended a “day long brainstorming session,” which is when the idea for Twitter was born. Dorsey proposed the concept of an individual utilising an SMS service to connect with a small group while sitting on a children’s slide at a park and eating Mexican food.
- Jack Dorsey founded Twitter in March of 2006, and the service went live in July of the same year.
- Odeo staff tested the initial Twitter prototype, and the public version debuted on July 15, 2006.
- Inspired by the name of the social media picture sharing website “Flickr” and the five-character length of American SMS short codes, Williams subsequently credited Noah Glass with coming up with the term “twttr” for the service’s original project code name.
- Finally, the group opted on the term “twitter,” which comes from the phrase “a quick burst of irrelevant information,” often known as “chirps from birds.”
- The South by Southwest (SXSW) event in 2007 marked the turning point in Twitter’s popularity. Twitter traffic spiked from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day during the incident.
- In 2007, each quarter averaged 400k tweets.
- Only 3 million people signed up in 2008.
- Just 1.25 million tweets were sent per day in 2008.
- In January of 2008, there were just eight workers.
- Two years ago, in 2009, Twitter had 8 million users.
- More than 400 people are now employed as of 2011.
- The majority, or 75%, of Twitter’s audience engages with the platform through a third-party application.
- Sixty percent of tweets are generated by outside applications.
- Around a hundred thousand Twitter apps are available.
- According to research conducted by Forrester, “Twitterers are the connected of the connected, overindexing at all Social Media behaviours. To give just one example, a recent Forrester analysis, “Who Flocks to Twitter,” found that Twitter users are three times as likely to be Creators (those who distribute and generate information via blog posts and YouTube) than the overall US population.
- The period between the first tweet and the billionth tweet was 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day.
- A billion Tweets are sent once every week, a week longer than it used to be.
- There were about 350 million tweets posted each week in March 2010.
- On March 11, 2011, 177 million tweets were sent, compared to the daily average of 140 million in February 2011.
- There were a record 456 tweets per second (TPS) on June 25, 2009, after Michael Jackson’s death.
- Record TPS was 6,939, reached 4 seconds after midnight on New Year’s Day in Japan.
- Each day, 572,000 new accounts are generated (March 12, 2011)
- Every day in February of 2011, an average of 460,000 new accounts were created.
- The number of people has increased by 182% in the last year.
- As of March 2011, it is predicted that there would be 225 million users.
- A total of 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010.
- There were an additional 100 million Twitter users in 2010.
- On January 22, 2010, NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer tweeted the first ever independent off-Earth Twitter message from the International Space Station.