Founded in March 2006, social media site Twitter has just celebrated its fifth birthday. Often referred to as the ‘SMS of the Internet’, Twitter will have an estimated 250 million users by the end of April 2011. Comparison with SMS mobile messaging shows that there is potential for huge further growth of Twitter, particularly in terms of message volumes.

Twitter is one of the most well-known social media sites, and has similarities with SMS mobile text messaging. Twitter users can post tweets, which are text-based message of up to 140 characters in length. In comparison, SMS allows mobile users to send text messages of up to 160 characters, which allows SMS to carry tweets with room to include a username.

The very first SMS was sent in December 1992 – over 18 years ago – and has become the most widely used mobile data application worldwide, with substantial increases in SMS volumes year on year. For example, in the UK, the total number of SMS messages increased by 250%, from 2005 (35.4 billion messages) to 2010 (124 billion messages). This represents a 170% increase in the number of SMS messages per mobile user, from about 1.6 to 4.2 messages per user per day.

Global SMS traffic reached 4.7 trillion messages in 2010, according to telecommunication consultancy Unwired Insight. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reported that there were approximately 5.3 billion mobile subscribers at the end of 2010 – equivalent to 76% of the world’s population. During 2010, an average of 79 SMS messages were sent per mobile user every month – the equivalent of nearly three SMS messages per day. Unwired Insight predicts that SMS traffic will reach 8 trillion messages in 2014, a 70% increase over 2010.

In comparison with SMS, it’s early days for Twitter. While it lags behind social networking site Facebook – which now has roughly 700 million global users – Twitter is expected to have 250 million users by the end of April 2011. Twitter rarely announces its number of users, but reported about 165 million in early October 2010. By March 2011, the average number of new Twitter accounts per day had reached approximately 460,000 – the equivalent of nearly 14 million new accounts per month. Also by March 2011, the average number of tweets per day reached 140 million, up from 50 million per day in March 2010. This corresponds to a relatively low volume of tweets per user – significantly less than one tweet per day on average.

Twitter still has huge potential for further growth, driven by:

– continued expansion in the number of Twitter users
– increases in the number of tweets per user.

Twitter will continue to expand beyond the USA, which is currently its largest market. In April 2010, Twitter reported that over 60% of registered Twitter accounts came from outside the USA. Companies are only just realising the potential of Twitter as an alternative channel to their customers. Continuation of the current trend in Twitter user growth could result in nearly 400 million Twitter users by the end of 2011.

If Twitter is successful in encouraging its users to become much more active, this would have a much more significant impact on the total volume of tweets than the growth in Twitter users. For example, increasing the average number of tweets per user to three per day (which is approximately the number of SMS messages sent per mobile user on a global basis) would yield the equivalent of increasing the total number of Twitter users from 250 million to over 2 billion users without any usage increase.

If Twitter continues to grow in strength in line with these numbers, organisations must position themselves to seize the opportunities from what is an exciting channel. Integration of social media is becoming an increasingly critical element to web optimisation for most organisations.

Author Bio: Dr Mark Heath is Co-Founder of web optimisation company Cambridgeshire SEO and telecom consultancy Unwired Insight. He has authored over 40 reports on IT and telecoms, and has advised hundreds of companies globally.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: twitter, social media, twitter stats, twitter users, twitter forecast, social media forecast, SMS