It appears the hockey growth phrase of Twitter is over.
Twitter’s international traffic has flattened. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. That translates into an increase of only 3.5%,
Here in the U.S. the news is even worse. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.
The flattening of Twitter’s growth rate can be seen in this chart from TechCrunch
One potential reason for the drop in traffic to Twitter.com is the use of third party Twitter clients like EasyTweets and Tweetdeck, who are still seeing tremendous growth numbers. In recent months Twitter has added new features like the Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features to bring people back to its home page. The problem is that many of these features have also been added to these third-party clients.
There are some estimates that these third party clients account for more than 50% of all Twitter usage, which is not a good long-term business strategy if you are Twitter.
Growth cannot continue forever. Twitter is just reaching its capacity in terms of the early adopters/early majority. The service should continue to grow and more people will join in just at a slower pace.
It is starting to evolve into a business platform. The connectivity is amazing. People are just starting to understand the power of twitter 2.0 The fly by night spammers will run out of energy and will get real jobs (or starve) The porno dawgs will get blocked and isolated. Real opportunity will start to show up on the scene and Well organized Content will be the Kings and Queens of the prosperity circles. My advice is develop some creative product or service market it yourself and pay other people if they create a transaction for you through their marketing efforts too.