Twitter’s US growth comes to a halt

By Molly McHugh December 15, 2010

A Pew study recently released news that only 8 percent of Americans use Twitter, and new data is suggesting that the site’s US user growth is slowing. A recent comScore report shows that Twitter drew over a million fewer unique visitors than it did last month.

While its US presence might be stalling, Twitter is still globally growing. This year, Twitter added 46 million accounts worldwide (take note, only around six million of those new users were in the US). And the site experienced a considerable amount of success in Japan, easily besting Facebook’s numbers.

While it seems like Americans might be slightly losing interest in the Tweet, the reformatted layout has been a success. US pageviews significantly increased since the new UI was introduced this fall.

What might surprise some are the companies that Twitter is on par with when it comes to user numbers. The site can’t touch Facebook or even MySpace, and it’s more along the lines of Yelp and LinkedIn. And while Twitter has incredibly devoted users, some are musing that it could be facing some challenges in the near future. Business Insider recently identified what it thinks will be the major issues for Twitter, including the fact that few registered users become daily users, and its struggles with implementing advertising. Now that the aforementioned sites offer status updates in addition to their other features, Twitter could find itself having to fend off more competition for the 140-character post.

Is it possible the Twitter has peaked? Probably not quite yet; the site still has a solid international fan base and a bidding war that recently pushed its value to $4 billion. Twitter likely has some tools in its arsenal to combat its lack of US growth. Question is, what are those tools and how will they change the site?

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

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