Wanted to share this data with you before I went away for the holidays.
It is pretty apparent that traffic to Twitter.com has peaked, and is now in a downward spiral.
According to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen, traffic to Twitter.com fell 27.8% between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors. comScore said unique visitors were down 8.1% in October, while Compete reported a 2.1% decline.
All these different reporting agencies capture data differently, so sometimes it is difficult to compare Compete with comScore with Nielsen. But when they all report the same trend, you cannot deny it. Less people are going to twitter.com than before.
Now twitter supporters will say the reason for the decline is because more people are accessing Twitter through different platforms like EasyTweet, or via their phone than every before. And that is probably true.
Crowd Science data from August 2009 indicated 43% of Twitter users accessed the service through third-party applications, and 19% through SMS.
So while the third-party Twitter traffic from mobile phones and API clients is impressive, I get the sense that Twitter peaked some time this summer. A huge percentage of the Tweets are spam, or automated, I cannot see Twitter meeting its growth projections of 26 million US adult users in 2010. In 2008, that number was 6 million.
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I would agree that more people are accessing Twitter through different platforms, not just Twitter.com. And as Twitter merges with other networks such as LinkedIn, the number of unique visitors to Twitter’s website will continue to decline, but that doesn’t negate the popularity or usage of this network. People can now streamline their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, making social networking convenient and easy. Why visit two separate sites?
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