Twitter Announces 100M Active Users. I'm Not Impressed.

Twitter has 100 million active monthly users and 400 million monthly visitors to its Web site, said CEO Dick Costolo, at what he called Twitter’s “state of the union” this past Thursday.  However, Costolo went on to say that 40 percent (or 40 million) of active users don’t create their own tweets, meaning of course, that they are just reading other users 140 character (or less) messages.  Additionally, many more people aren’t even logged in when they visit Twitter.com.

While Twitter is still showing growth, I’m not that impressed with the statistics.  The numbers aren’t necessarily bad, but they are much lower than I would have anticipated given the amount of mainstream press coverage the site has gotten over the past three or so years.  The fact that only 60 million users are actively tweeting and pushing content to the site shows conversion issues or that people lose interest too quickly.

Twitter needs to focus on increasing conversions and retention of users.  In order to do both of those things they need to figure out ways to get new users involved by making it easier to build up a following early on.  Face it, no one likes talking to a wall, which is essentially what ends up happening.  These new users start sending out tweets, expecting to receive replies which never appear, leaving them discouraged and frustrated.

It also should be of some concern to advertisers.  Twitter is looking to implement its new in-stream advertising model soon, but if a large portion of the sites visitors do not login, they will not see these ads.  And trust me, there is a difference between reaching 100 million people and only reaching 60 million people in the advertising world.  Because depending upon how many users will these in-stream promoted tweets will absolutely affect the price at which they can sell promoted tweets to advertisers.