New figures from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.
Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets per day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter Inc.
Since then, though, that number has gone up — by a lot.
In a blog post on the Twitter site today, Weil said that 50 million tweets are posted every day. That’s an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.
Twitter use has been steadily climbing.
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In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, that figure had grown to 2.5 million per day. Then the volume of Tweets grew by 1,400 per cent to reach 35 million per day by the end of last year.
However, Weil didn’t say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets per day. Are the top 10 per cent of users, for instance, responsible for 80 per cent of all tweets? That’s not clear.
Just last month, a study from RJMetrics Inc. showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.
The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive and that the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December.
According to RJMetrics, only 17 per cent of all Twitter accounts posted tweets in December. That’s down from more than 70 per cent in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling operation with far fewer users.
Twitter, according to the RJMetrics report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.
Much of this tweeting is done from the workplace and sometimes at a significant cost to the employer.
For instance, last October a study in the U.K. revealed that people who use Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are costing U.K. businesses about 1.38 billion pounds, or around Can$2.24 billion a year.
The study was conducted by London-based Morse PLC, an IT services and technology company. Morse surveyed 1,460 office workers and found that 57 per cent said use social networking sites for personal use while in the office.
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Those workers use social networks an average of 40 minutes a day at work, which adds up to a lost week each year, the survey found.
“The popularity of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook has grown considerably over the last couple of years,” aid Philip Wicks, a consultant at Morse, in a statement.
“However with it has come the temptation to visit such sites during office hours [where] the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole. It is clear that businesses look to formulate and enforce sensible usage policies.”
Morse, which commissioned research firm TNS Group to do the study, isn’t alone in its findings.
Last Jul Nucleus Research, an IT research company in Boston, released a study showing that companies where users are free to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average of 1.5 per cent in total employee productivity.
The survey also showed that 77 per cent of workers who have a personal Facebook account use it during work hours.
A study commissioned by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm, last October, showed that companies are starting to take on social networkers in their offices.
This study found that 54 per cent of U.S. companies had banned office use of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job.
Source: Computerworld.com