Smartphone use fueling Twitter growth
Twitter’s record breaking performance over the past six months has been attributed to a series of major news events from super-injunctions to Bin laden but Twitter head Dick Costolo believes that the most consistent growth driver has been smartphone usage.
According to the Pew Research Centre Twitter use has increased from 8% of connected US adults in November to 13% today.
But Costolo believes even these figures are undercounting the micro blogging sites true reach, telling the Dow jones technology conference: “What we see internally is that we are growing much faster than that. We have grown our mobile usage over 150 per cent since the beginning of the year.”
Despite healthy traffic figures Twitter has thus far failed to monetise its offering but is introducing a range of new features which will ease the sharing of pictures and video.
Advertisers on the site have quadrupled to 600 since the end of last year following the successful introduction of sponsored “trending topics”. One Volkswagen initiative saw 52% of viewers clicking on it.
Twitter is believed to have gathered around 300m registered accounts since its creation in 2006 and hosts 1bn fresh tweets every six days.