The growth of Twitter – now 50 million messages per day

If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.

In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.

In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.

In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.

And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.

image

Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.

50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.

It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.

And I’m back in the top 50 UK marketing blogs…

My blogging life has taken a bit of a hit recently, as the implications of taking a new, exciting, and involved job alongside having a young son have taken a bit of adjustment – thankfully I’m getting the hang of it, as long as the trains run on time and the wifi is working!

Plus the occasional boost helps – I’ve been asked by a couple of people about possibly speaking at their events (more on this if and when it’s public), and for once I remembered to book my tickets in advance for the London Twestival.

And on another happy note, I’m back in the top 50 UK marketing blogs, as tracked each month over at Spinning Around.

Which is nice after a couple of months of seeing rankings and traffic declining to both my blogs – directly proportional to the effort/focus being put in.

Interestingly Adage, which has the overall Power 150 global ranking (Of 1053 blogs!) has dropped Google Page Rank from the metrics which power it.

Which in itself isn’t so bad, but it’s led to the Collective Intellect measurement doubling in influence on the list – and whereas Page Rank came down to a fairly open set of criteria, I’ve never managed to work out exactly why some sites do better with Collective Intellect than others in any meaningful way (I may just be missing something – let me know if I am!). And it also means that one of the few metrics which is more ‘static’ has been replaced by more ‘dynamic’ metrics – so if you want to climb the AdAge rankings, I suspect targeting the seeding and marketing side of things will have even greater importance.

Which I suppose, since we’re meant to be the best digital marketing blogs, is a good thing!

Tomorrow should be very interesting

Whilst today has been approaching epic fail status, (including my other blog, 140char.com having some kind of outage for 50% of visitors – including me), tomorrow has suddenly shaped up to be very interesting.

I’ve suddenly ended up with a breakfast date over soup with someone I’ve been trying to catch up with for ages.

Then there’s a good chance I might actually make MeasurementCamp for once…it’s always really interesting, and it has more of a focus on actually coming up with metrics (hence the name) that work for social media and marketing!

Then catching up on some of the plans for the day job at Bauer Media.

And then off to the very interesting EverySingleOneofUs event.

Considering some of the complications and illness-inspired delays that have already hit me (and my family) in 2009, it feels like tomorrow is the day it all kicks off.

Thanks to Microsoft for a good month for TheWayoftheWeb!

Like a lot of bloggers, I seem to have become slightly addicted to compulsively checking statistics when producing content would be more productive. But occasionally it provides a nice morale boost, such as today.

Despite missing the first 10 days of the month on holiday, comparing month on month shows improvements to pretty much every metric I could want, with a couple of days still left to go:

Visits +2.24%

Page Views +6.88%

Pages/Visit +4.54%

My two favourites:

Bounce Rate: -8.59%

Avg Time on Site: +3.13%

So everything is up except bounce rate – and I like seeing that down! And obviously my post ‘Has Microsoft made a major marketing mistake‘ drove a lot of visit – but strangely, as I’m not really a videogame blogger, it didn’t drive up bounce rate or single page visits!

After that, it’s a three-way tie between:

Strangely, despite the good growth in traffic, I appear to have dropped slightly on Technorati and the Adage ranking – so the quality/quantity of inbound links seems to have dropped? RSS subscriber numbers have also increased, despite one odd day of Feedburner telling me I suddenly had no subscribers on any blog!

And the other boost I’ve had has been attending some great business meetings with some very smart people and companies recently, and having several of them claim to have read my blogging and liked it – and most demonstrating that they’ve at least read one or two posts in detail. I’ll always treasure one person even bringing a prinout of one of my posts with highlighted sections to a meeting!