Twitter today reported some usage numbers in conjunction with their fifth birthday. The numbers are hugely impressive:
- One billion tweets per week (it took over 3 years for them to reach the first billion tweets)
- 140 million tweets per day (up from 50m a year ago)
- 460,000 new accounts created per day
The hockey stick growth Twitter has experienced to-date is the kind that most of us can only dream of. That said, the published numbers don't tell a lot of the story.
The true measure of Twitter growth is not the number of new signups, it's the level of engagement.
Yes, 460k new accounts per day is huge, but there are days I feel like I get that many Twitter spammers (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit). What I'd like to know is how many engaged Twitter users there are.
There are many ways to measure engagement, but here's a simple 5-point scale I just made up:
Level 0: I signed up to follow Charlie Sheen (or Oprah, Ashton or Justin Bieber). I don't really tweet myself (except I occasionally will RT something my celebrity idol has tweeted);
Level 1: I follow at least a few dozen people and have a few dozen followers myself. I tweet occasionally but often can go a week or two between tweets. I'm still not quite sure what all the excitement is about, but since a few of my friends are on Twitter, I don't want to be left out. I follow back everyone who follows me (though some of them are bots).
Level 2: I tweet several times per week and have used both the RT and @reply functions. I'm starting to find Twitter to be a useful way to find interesting information I may have otherwise missed. I rarely if ever see an "I just farted" tweet in my stream.
Level 3: I tweet regularly and have begun to engage via Twitter with others. I retweet interesting tweets, reply to others regularly and have *met* people in my industry via Twitter whom I would not have otherwise met. I am careful about whom I follow. My follower:follows ratio is at least 2:1 if not higher. Twitter has become an important part of my news stream.
Level 4: I use Twitter on both desktop and mobile. Twitter was the first place that I turned for insight on the Egyptian uprising and the Japanese earthquake and tsunamis. A day rarely passes where I am not retweeted or have a conversation on Twitter. I know my @klout score and view Twitter as my primary source of real-time information.
Level 5: my name is Robert Scoble.
These might not be the ideal measures of Twitter usage, but they're a starting point. I'm sure the team at Klout could provide more perspective. But seeing usage stats on the growth of Twitter using this classification would be significantly more useful than what Twitter have released today.
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