Twitter Nears Facebook's Daily Status Update Volume

This afternoon Twitter announced that the company now receives over 50 million status updates per day. Compare that with Facebook who states they currently receive over 60 million updates per day. Despite Twitter being a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company now owns a massive percentage of the total status updates posted each day on the web. The latest statistics should revive discussion over the ongoing Facebook versus Twitter war. While Twitter is not releasing statistics about the percentage of users tweeting on a daily basis, a report published last week suggests that the percentage of Twitter users posting updates each month remains relatively low (somewhere around 16 percent). So what information can we derive from the latest statistics? Twitter Rapidly Approaching Facebook's Status Update Volume Despite being a fraction of the size of Facebook, Twitter has a large enough sampling of information on the web since they appear to have the most active users on the web. While we don't know the exact volume of tweets per user, the top users continue to remain active. The behavior of a Twitter user also differs significantly over Facebook users who arguably don't post updates as frequently. Twitter's Grip On The Real-Time Web Is Significant Ultimately it doesn't matter how many users a company has as long as they have the most connected and most active users. Even Google knows that a fraction of the content on the web isn't updated regularly and much of it is irrelevant. As long as Twitter can capture the most important segment of the social media market, the company has a shot at competing in the real-time web wars. One important factor that would determine Twitter's grip on the real-time web is the percentage of tweets being sent directly to Facebook. Twitter Has A Ways To Go When Including Facebook's Shared Content Despite Twitter's dominance in the "status update" world, one needs to include the fact that more than 700 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared on Facebook each day. That's in addition to the 60 million status updates. In theory the volume of links and news stories should be included in the comparison to Twitter. Unfortunately Facebook doesn't break out the volume of links posted each day, but we could make a wild guess and say that at least 100 million links are posted each day in addition to the status updates. Conclusion Facebook should be concerned about the latest statistics from Twitter. While it's difficult to say how close Twitter is to competing with the volume of relevant content being posted on Facebook each day, the growth continues to be impressive. At this rate, Twitter could eventually be a direct competitor to Facebook in terms of status updates and links shared if the growth continues. Is Twitter going to be competing on the level of Facebook anytime soon? Probably not since their user base is still a fraction of Facebook, however it's pretty clear that Twitter has some of the most active internet users on the web.

Social Pro Daily

Twitter Nears Facebook's Daily Status Update Volume

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill