U.S. Traffic To Twitter Down… But Does It Matter?
By Anna Johnson on December 2nd, 2009According to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen, traffic to Twitter.com was down a dramatic 27.8 percent between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors. The decline is echoed by comScore data that unique visitors were down 8.1 percent in October, and Compete data that uniques were down 2.1 percent.
But how meaningful are these declines? Sure traffic to the Twitter.com website is down month over month, after sensational growth at the start of the year, but they don’t necessarily reflect lower interest in Twitter itself. The declines could, in fact, reflect migration of more and more people to Twitter clients i.e. third party applications and mobile devices used by people to access and interact with Twitter.
As reported by eMarketer, Crowd Science data from August 2009 showed that 43 percent of Twitter users accessed the service through third-party applications, and 19 percent through SMS. Meanwhile, RJ Metrics reported a drop in share of tweets via the Twitter website versus other sources between June and July 2009, and TweetStats found that around 30 percent of daily tweets came from Twitter.com in mid-November 2009.
For all these reasons, a decline in traffic to Twitter.com is not necessarily material or reflective of a reduction in its use.
Source: eMarketer, “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up,” eMarketer, November 20, 2009
