3 Marketing Insights From Twitter's New Usage Stats

Yesterday at Twitter's developer conference, Chirp , lots of new Twitter related news and stats were announced . One major announcement, was that the Library of Congress has acquired all of Twitter's archived tweets, giving the library more than a billion tweets in its archive. In addition to the Library of Congress announcement, Twitter also announced a fresh batch of usage statistics:

• Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users
• 300,000 new users sign up per day
• Approximately 60% of them are coming from outside the U.S
• Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
• 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
• Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new sign
• There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day
• There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
• Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API
• 37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet

3 Marketing Insights From Twitter's New Usage Stats

1. Mobile Matters - With 37% of active Twitter users relying on cell phones to send and receive tweets , it is important that marketers understand that social networks are not limited to one device. Twitter is a great example of a social network that is used on desktops, smart phones and via SMS .  As a marketer it is important communicate with customers and prospects on the "screens" they use the most. This usage rate could likely increase due to the recent acquisition Twitter made of popular iPhone application Tweetie . The company plans to release the app for free instead of the current price of $2.99, which could help speed mobile adoption.

2. Marketers Need to Understand APIs - An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of instructions that lets a software platform communicate and work with other software. Twitter announced that more than 100,000 applications now use the Twitter API. Twitter, a company of only about 175 employees, would never have had the resources to build all of these applications itself. However, by having an API, it was able to make it easier for other people to build on its platform. As a marketer, understanding what is possible with APIs is important. APIs can let you create better online experiences for your customers, give you access to social data that can inform marketing decisions, and provide access to a built-in community of users. So many companies want to build their own social network or web application, but building a community around it can be quite costly. Using APIs of existing platforms like Twitter gives marketers access to a large built-in community of users.

3. Twitter SEO Is Important - Do you think about keywords in your tweets? You should. With 600 million searches per day on Twitter, the platform has become a major real-time search engine. As a marketer you likely pay attention to keywords on your web site, why not on Twitter?  Twitter is still refining how it ranks tweets in its search results. However, the first key step is to make sure that your tweets include words that your prospective customers are searching for. While you likely know what these words are, you can also do searches of your own and see what types of words competitors are using.

Many of these new stats are impressive and offer insight into the future of social media marketing.

Do these new stats change how your business approaches Twitter?

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