Twitter Sees Sharp Rise In Daily Users

Twitter has seen an explosion in user engagement over the past two years, according to a US survey, which found that the proportion of online adults who use the social network on a daily basis has quadrupled since late 2010.

A telephone survey carried out by by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that overall Twitter adoption was “steady”, at 15 percent of the online adult population, compared to 13 percent in May 2011.

User engagement up

However, the engagement of those users has skyrocketed in recent months, with 8 percent of the online adult population using it “on a typical day”, Pew found.

“The proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled since May 2011 and has quadrupled since late 2010 – at that point just 2 percent of online adults used Twitter on a typical day,” Pew said in a research note.

The research group said the rise may be due to the rapid spread of smartphones over the past few years. “Smartphone users are particularly likely to be using Twitter,” Pew stated.

The data is based on telephone interviews conducted from 20 January to 19 February among a sample of 2,253 adults aged 18 and older, and from 15 March to 3 April among a sample of 2,254 adults.

Younger users tended to favour the service, with 26 percent of those aged from 18 to 29 using it, compared to 14 percent for users aged 30 to 49. For users aged 18 to 24 the figure was even higher, at 31 percent.

The survey found that more than 28 percent of black Internet users had adopted Twitter, with 13 percent using it on a typical day.

Sharp rise in ‘active users’

Twitter, which is rumoured to be planning a stock market debut, challenged Pew’s view of its growth, saying that its number of “active users” stood at more than 140 million in March, up from 100 million in September 2011.

“Growth is extremely strong,” Twitter said in a statement.

The company noted that the quantity of tweets has skyrocketed in recent months.

“It took us 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to reach 1 billion Tweets,” Twitter stated. “Now, we see more than 1 billion Tweets every 3 days.”

In May, nearly a year after launching operations in the UK, Twitter said it had 10 million British users, with an unusually high proportion accessing the service primarily through a mobile phone.

Eight million UK users accessed the site through a mobile in the last 30 days, or 80 percent of the total, compared with 55 percent for Twitter globally, the company said in May. Twitter was initially conceived as an SMS-based service, which is why messages are limited to 140 characters.

Last week Twitter said it has begun an upgrade that will increase the page loading speed by an average of five times. The performance boost is to be achieved by moving the rendering of the Twitter pages from the user’s browser to the server. Other changes include the disappearance of hashbangs (#!) from permalinks, and optimisation of the JavaScript code.

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