This afternoon Twitter announced that the company now receives over 50 million status updates per day. Compare that with Facebook who states they currently receive over 60 million updates per day. Despite Twitter being a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company now owns a massive percentage of the total status updates posted each day on the web. The latest statistics should revive discussion over the ongoing Facebook versus Twitter war.
While Twitter is not releasing statistics about the percentage of users tweeting on a daily basis, a report published last week suggests that the percentage of Twitter users posting updates each month remains relatively low (somewhere around 16 percent). So what information can we derive from the latest statistics?
Twitter Rapidly Approaching Facebook’s Status Update Volume
Despite being a fraction of the size of Facebook, Twitter has a large enough sampling of information on the web since they appear to have the most active users on the web. While we don’t know the exact volume of tweets per user, the top users continue to remain active. The behavior of a Twitter user also differs significantly over Facebook users who arguably don’t post updates as frequently.
Twitter’s Grip On The Real-Time Web Is Significant
Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many users a company has as long as they have the most connected and most active users. Even Google knows that a fraction of the content on the web isn’t updated regularly and much of it is irrelevant. As long as Twitter can capture the most important segment of the social media market, the company has a shot at competing in the real-time web wars.
One important factor that would determine Twitter’s grip on the real-time web is the percentage of tweets being sent directly to Facebook.
Twitter Has A Ways To Go When Including Facebook’s Shared Content
Despite Twitter’s dominance in the “status update” world, one needs to include the fact that more than 700 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared on Facebook each day. That’s in addition to the 60 million status updates. In theory the volume of links and news stories should be included in the comparison to Twitter. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t break out the volume of links posted each day, but we could make a wild guess and say that at least 100 million links are posted each day in addition to the status updates.
Conclusion
Facebook should be concerned about the latest statistics from Twitter. While it’s difficult to say how close Twitter is to competing with the volume of relevant content being posted on Facebook each day, the growth continues to be impressive. At this rate, Twitter could eventually be a direct competitor to Facebook in terms of status updates and links shared if the growth continues.
Is Twitter going to be competing on the level of Facebook anytime soon? Probably not since their user base is still a fraction of Facebook, however it’s pretty clear that Twitter has some of the most active internet users on the web.
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I believe it's tough to compare these two numbers:
If you share a link on Twitter (which is a large part of the usage) this seems to be counted as a status update.
On Facebook sharing web content is happening over 700m times per day according to Facebook in addition to the 60m status updates:
"More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week"
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Or do I get something wrong here?
Comment by Jens Begemann — February 22, 2010 @ 1:07 pm
In addition to the sharing of links, photos, videos, and notes not being counted in the facebook numbers wouldn't you have to include each comment on facebook as a "status update" to equate the two numbers? I'm guessing they are counting each reply on Twitter as an update, yes?
Comment by Jeremy Couch — February 22, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
Facebook should allow posting only to own profile skipping friends' newsfeeds. This will make people post more updates.
If "skip friends' newsfeed" option is there then i will post more updates to my profile. Currently i restrain from posting updates because it may spam my friends.
Comment by Gentel — February 22, 2010 @ 6:24 pm
I update my Facebook status two or three times per day, while i update my Twitter almost every hour.
Because, in Facebook if you're updating status every hour u can be considered as spammers. But in Twitter, no one will complaint even if you're updating your status in every 5 minutes because it has been designed to working that way.
Comment by holabola — February 22, 2010 @ 11:56 pm
Twitter has no doubt a long way to go. They just can not beat Facebook as it already has user base of 400 million and it is still increasing.
Comment by Suhasini — February 23, 2010 @ 6:00 am
test
Comment by Manjeera Patnaikuni — February 24, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
Well honesltyy speakign in twitter the only thing to do is udate status messages and most of them follow their celebrities.. who keep updating their statues for theor fans.. facebook is not like that though .. facebook is not just an status update place…its all about social network seriously, you play games, meet poeple, chat, and most importantly sharing and looking at friends photos( alot more than can be done on twiiter)… so if twitter boasts of being the King of one and Jack of nothing else…be my guest.. in the end it doesnt matter…
Comment by Avinash — December 3, 2010 @ 10:35 am