So Just How Popular Is Twitter?

If you’re going to spend time developing your social media profiles, such as Twitter, it makes sense to use sites that will remain popular and relevant for the foreseeable future.

So here are the latest social media stats relating to Twitter.

After a temporary blip in traffic during May, Twitter continued to grow strongly during June (traffic up 16.6% to 23 million unique visitors).

During June, Facebook grew by 8.45% to 122.5 million unique visitors, while Myspace grew by 7.19% to 61 million unique visitors.

So Twitter and Facebook continue to grow rapidly (with Twitter rapidly closing the gap - at thie rate of growth, Twitter will overtake Facebook within 2 years), with Myspace remaining relevant as far as the areas of music and entertainment are concerned.

During June, Twitter users spend an average of 31 minutes, 17 seconds on the site. However, as this doesn’t include the use of the Twitter API for other clients such as Tweetdeck or Twhirl, the real amount of time spend on the site may be significantly higher.

But even more impressive is the sheer amount of coverage received by Twitter. It’s everywhere at present, including the news, newspapers, TV shows and even the movies.

The buzz is deafening!

During June, Twitter was mentioned 2.73 billion times across all media. And that’s not including the number of times it has been mentioned in local newspapers and television programs around the world.

In fact, news monitoring service VMS has estimated that the value of these media mentions over the past month is worth $48 million. Compare that with Bing, the recently rebranded Microsoft search engine, which only received $573,834 worth of media mentions over the past 30 days. Even Google, the undisputed internet leader, received less coverage than Twitter during June.

And finally, a recent study by TubeMogul has shown that in terms of the amount of video viewed, traffic from Twitter is significantly more valuable than traffic from Facebook or Digg. While Digg traffic will watch for an average of 58 seconds and Facebook viewers watch 74 seconds, Twitter traffic clocks up an average viewing time of 118 seconds.

Various reasons for this difference have been advanced. The most likely explanation is that unlike Facebook and Digg, which are targeted at the whole community and have a broad range of on page distractions, Twitter users have a more closely targeted audience (their followers) with a built in tendency to click on links posted by their favorite Twitter users.

So what do all these figures tell us?

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter remain the most popular social media sites and continue to pull away from the rest of the crowd.

The amazing success of Twitter has even helped to redefine the future development of Web 2.0 social media services. Obviously it’s highly unlikely that Twitter will be able to maintain this level of media buzz and visitor growth, but the longer it continues to soar, the more influence it will have on new Web 2.0 sites.

And due to the sheer number of visitors they attract and the level of participation they encourage, all three of these sites are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

So all your effort spent building your Twitter profile is unlikely to disappear any time soon. And on a deeper level these new stats also show that Twitter is an extremely effective way to promote online videos.

Let us know you thoughts about these latest figures using the comments below. Do you think Twitter will continue to grow at the current rate? How long will this level of Twitter related media buzz last? Will Twitter overtake Facebook? Will Twitter remain relevant or will it suddenly fall out of fashion? And do you think the reputed goal of Twitter to achieve 1 billion users by 2020 is achievable?

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