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I will buy dinner (or maybe the entire restaurant) at a restaurant of your choice for anyone who can prove to me that what I read from multiple sources, including Wikipedia and SlideShare, last week is true: "Twitter has more than 55 million daily users who post short updates on anything from their latest date to their views on Congressional hearings." Impossible -- and not only is this number WILDLY off, it's probably off by a factor of between 10x and 50x. I am not sure who's to blame for this huge mistake -- whether it's Twitter, their VCs, the Bloomberg reporter who wrote the story, or some optimistic analyst -- it just doesn't make sense -- and I think most people know this. Hopefully Twitter, like Facebook Stats, will help us out to give us the real story, but I am not holding my breath. I was disappointed to search the Twitter blog under "stats" to find the most recent update was literally about a year ago. So therefore, here are three back of the napkin calculations that get us close to the real story -- which is still phenomenal by the way: 1) Check out our friends at Compete.com -- for U.S. based inquiries like this, I think they're the most reliable. According to their data, Twitter's monthly unique visitors have increased a whopping 800% in the last year, but they still chart monthly users at 5.97 million. I assume that this is mostly, if not all, US-data -- and if you assume Twitter still gets 40% of its traffic domestically that would extrapolate into about 15 million monthly unique users worldwide. (NB w/ thanks to Jonathan and Robert: Safe to add a few more to this total (not several million) to account for those who use sites like tweetdeck, twihrl, tweetfeed, facebook and other platforms to post their feeds)
2) Look at Pew's recent survey -- and you will find that 11% of America's online adult population say that they have EVER used Twitter, and 4% reported doing so in the last day. Let's say that the online adult population in the U.S. is about 180 million -- 4% of 180 million is 7.2 million. Keeping in mind that the Pew survey, which is excellent as always, has a margin of error of 2.8% -- even the most optimistic calculation looks much closer to Compete.com's number than the 55 million quoted in the Bloomberg story. 3) Conduct the family and friends test. According to Facebook, they have about 175 million active users, of which 70% are outside the US. That means that there are about 52.5 million active Facebook users in the US, according to Facebook (NB. I don't think the Facebook Factsheet has been updated in a few months at least). Looking at the Compete.com graph, again, which is mostly US data, this is in the ballpark with their estimates.
Ask yourself, do you have more friends on Facebook or Twitter? I know the answer -- and I am willing to be that the average person in America knows at least 10x as many people who are active on Facebook than tweet daily. This post is not intended to be anti-Twitter. While I think they should come clean with their real user base stats (isn't this the era of authenticity and transparency?) -- this message is intended for others who consume, analyze and are otherwise involved in the Web 2.0 and social media space today. There's plenty of great stuff happening every day -- I cannot imagine us ever turning away -- it's best for everyone though if we maintain composure, understand that this space is in its infancy and will continue to grow and expand in very meaningful ways. And oh yeah, Bloomberg -- check the facts please.
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