News Bits: Twitter 30x Smaller Than Facebook, Report Says

Written by Erin Barker

Tuesday, December 23. 2008 at 11:45 AM EST Post a comment

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Marketing firm HubSpot today released its first "State of the Twittersphere" report, showing wildly different statistics for super-secret Twitter Inc. than we've seen for more traditional social networking sites.

While Facebook reports having 140 million active users and growing at a rate of 600,000 new accounts per day, Twitter has 4 million to 5 million users and grows at a rate of 5,000 to 10,000 per day, says the report, which was compiled using HubSpot's Twitter Grader tool to examine 500,000 Twitter accounts. And the differences go beyond just that: Thirty-five percent of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers, and 38 percent haven't uploaded a picture, showing that perhaps the more simple and anonymous nature of Twitter provides less user engagement, compared to sites like Facebook, MySpace , and LinkedIn.

Figure 1:

Click thumbnail for full image.

Regardless, the report shows that 70 percent of Twitter's users joined in 2008, and 20 percent joined in the last 60 days, a sign that growth may rev up soon.

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