On Monday Twitter revealed how it has grown since 2007, and how much activity the social media service is seeing at the moment. There have been some reports that suggest usage of Twitter is waining, but Twitter’s own data tells a different story.
Twitter Activity Rates
It is problematic to compare activity on Twitter with runaway social media leader, Facebook – as well as Buzz – because the users carry out distinct actions on each platform. But the new data states that Twitter registers approximately 50 million tweets a day, which equates to 600 per second. This is compared to 700 Facebook status updates per second, and the most recent data from Buzz states there are 55 Buzz posts per second.
There is of course a great deal more activity on Facebook aside from status updates (comments, photo description etc.), and so by one measure, Facebook is way ahead of its competition. Another problem with this data is that the most recent Buzz post rates date from just a couple of days after its inception.
On top of this, the figure of 700 tweets per minute has to be tempered by the fact that comments on tweets as well as re-tweets are included in this number.
SEO and Social Media Marketing
The opportunities presented to internet marketers within social media are undeniably huge, but the activity on the three big platfroms is still dwarfed by the activity on the major search engines. Searches on Google approximate to 2 million per minute, with 194,000 per minute on Yahoo and 56,000 per minute on Bing.
Monetising Social Media
While there is a great deal of activity on the search engines, social media nevertheless offers a different kind of marketing proposition. Facebook, for example, can target potential customers very effectively by utilising the information it has stored about its users. Buzz could be developing in a similar fashion long-term, while Twitter offers a far simpler, user dominated platform – where tweets have to be genuinely engaging in order to attract attention from potential consumers.
Add to this the fact that Twitter has imminent plans to monetize its activities by bringing adverts to its users, and the battle to win social media users is a very significant element of the internet marketing landscape.
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