Twitter Traffic Falls -2.43% For November. Facebook -0.47%, LinkedIn -6.93%, Friendfeed -20.95%
This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.
Unique visitors to Twitter.com fell for the third successive month, dropping 2.43% overall, to 22,481,568, according to Compete.com. More concerning for the network was a -7.24% dip in overall visits.
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Overall, traffic to all social media fell, with Facebook losing -0.47% to 128,339,156 unique visitors for November, but gaining 3.51% to 2,601,399,595 visitors overall.
Friendfeed fell sharply, down 20.95% to just 552,147 uniques, and has now lost almost half of its unique visitors since peaking at 1,044,326 in August. Overall visitors fell 26.62%.
LinkedIn, which has been the social media star the past five or six months, fell for the first time since May, losing 6.93% of unique visitors, and 11.53% overall.
MySpace dipped -2.64%, and -3.08% overall.
Plurk, which was once considered a rival to Twitter, saw just over two hundred thousand unique visitors for the month, and surely will not last much into 2010.
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Always remember that Compete mainly counts US traffic.
Absolutely. As I stated elsewhere in these comments (and within similar posts in this blog) this isn’t indicative of Twitter’s global performance, and the transition many make from Twitter.com to a favourite Twitter client of course has an impact on visits to the home page, but it is of interest that, LinkedIn aside, social media has plateaued for a few months in the USA. The States of course kick-started the rise in all of these major networks, and while Europe has seen the biggest growth in the last few months, it’ll be interesting to see if we’ll later see some plateauing/weakness there a few months from now, and whether the States will then pick up the slack.
I don’t understand the point of this article. I also don’t understand how this statement holds any truth: “More concerning for the network was a -7.24% dip in overall visits.”
How is it concerning in the case in Twitter and Facebook?
You make it seem like social sites are somehow being utilized less and are failing. Granted, while that might be the case (and should be in some cases) with some of those sites (Friendster in particular), it is highly unlikely in the case of Facebook and Twitter.
I mean, you do realize that mobile access to these services is growing, right? Third-party tools are constantly plugging into these services via APIs at increasing rates, making site metrics like Compete far less accurate than anyone can imagine. This is a certainty in Twitter’s defense, and it is a growing case for Facebook.
It is your journalistic duty to make the readers aware of this.
James, I’m aware of all of these things, and have written about them previously. This look at Compete’s numbers is a monthly feature on Twittercism – if you check out the ‘Related Posts’ section at the bottom of the article, you can read the previous articles.
Compete is very USA-centric and like all statistical tools should be taken with a hefty pinch, but assuming on a month-to-month basis their algorithms are essentially the same, then the data has some value, if only in a comparative sense. And a drop of over 7% in monthly visitors is worth noting – even if all those folks have moved over completely to an alternative client sauce, it’s of interest that the numbers haven’t been made up by new visitors (all of whom would of course likely start on Twitter.com).
That said, I hardly think Twitter or Facebook are ‘failing’, and at no point in this article did I say anything like that at all.
Your tone has caught me a little off-guard, to be honest. It might behove you to read the blog in more detail before jumping to conclusions.
Note that Compete is US only, so this might not reflect actual traffic to these sites.
Is this counting only traffic to the actual Twitter web site? If this does not include traffic via the many Twitter clients it may substantially misrepresent the picture. It could, rather than reflecting a decline in system usage, reflect a trend to off-site usage with growing usage – hard to say with this limited view of the derivation of these numbers.
Compete tracks US data, yes. See elsewhere in this comments area for my thoughts.