No Pick-Up In Twitter’s U.S. Traffic In November

CM Comment: An important trend to watch.

December 15, 2009: summarized from TechCrunch -- Twitter’s U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors from 19.24 million unique visitors in October. It’s no surprise that Twitter’s U.S. growth is stalling as the numbers have indicated this pattern for some time. At least the microblogging network didn’t drop in visitors, as it did in October, declining by 8 percent in U.S. traffic.

While Twitter’s international growth also flattened in October, the microblogging network is still seeing considerable growth when it comes to year over year numbers. Twitter has grown over 1200% since November of 2008, when the microblogging network had only 1.5 million unique visitors.

But it’s important to note that these numbers don’t mean that Twitter as a service is becoming less popular. While the number of uniques to Twitter’s site isn’t growing, third part Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are growing like crazy. In October, CEO Evan Williams admitted to the stall in growth in the U.S. saying that many of the new features of the site could jumpstart growth in traffic, including the Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features.

But from the early numbers, it looks like these features haven’t really done much for Twitter’s traffic. And many of these features have been added to the third-party Twitter clients, which easily account for half of all Twitter usage. But the distance between Twitter and rival Facebook keeps growing, and if this trend continues, it looks like Twitter could be out of Facebook’s rear-view mirror completely, especially with the new Facebook feature to publish status updates to Twitter rolling out in the next week. On the other hand, maybe Facebook will help it reach a whole new audience segment.

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