Twitter traffic leaps putting paid to growth critics

He wasn’t making it up at all. Last month Twitter co-founder Evan Williams hit back at claims of falling usage and this week the stats are in the Twitter’s traffic has taken a leap.

Williams made his comments after a bunch of posts suggested a falloff, but since that things have only looked up for Twitter. He said Twitter’s growth was going to pick up and he wasn’t wrong, according to new ComScore traffic figures.

ComScore data shows that the number of unique visitors to Twitter jumped by around 9% between December and January to 21.79 million, which is an all time high.

 That beats its previous high of 21.25 million in July 2009. The jump is in part being attributed to Google’s real-time search service, which launched in December early, according to Hitwise. That has become incredibly useful way to interact with Twitter and personally I am using this most days. Clearly, I’m far from alone.

LeeAnn Prescott has taken a closer look at the data and says in a post that Twitter’s traffic coming from “Google increased by 9% when comparing the week ending December 5 to the week ending February 13 (from 12.8% to 14%)”.

She said that Hitwise also showed a modest increase of 5% in market share of US visits to Twitter in that time period.

But it is more than that. Earlier this week I blogged about the growth of Twitter among 24 year olds and younger and how that was helping to fuel Twitter’s growth beyond its original older demographic.

Clearly, as with the broadening of its demographic base the rise in traffic is great news for Twitter as its continues to grow in its more mature markets like the US and the UK and powering ahead elsewhere internationally.

Overall internationally comScore says Twitter hit 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up 8% from 65.2 million in December.

Into this Twitter mix comes Google Buzz and Facebook Zero, which are both looking for larger slices of the real-time market. It is too early to say what will happen with Buzz. I still maintain what I said at the start (in a tweet) that I don’t have the time. I could change my mind, it is always a possibility.

Facebook Zero is something else preparing to bubble up. Will that impact Twitter? Well it could hit Twitter’s growth among teens who are already big Facebook users and mobile owners. That’s a clash waiting to happen.

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