Twitter's growth shows no indications of slowing any time soon. Last month, Twitter said the number of tweets per day had climbed to 50 million.
To get a better handle on Twitter's recent growth in the U.S. and internationally, as well as assess its "stickiness" as a service, Sysomos examined one billion tweets over the past four months. It analyzed each tweet for their location based on the information provided by users within their profiles.
The results show the number of tweets per day has soared 30% in the past four months to about 53 million in late-March, compared with 40 million in early-December.
On a month-over-month-basis, tweet growth was 22.7% in January, 13% in February and 14.6% in March.
In looking at the growth in tweets geographically, there has been stronger growth outside the U.S. in the past three months.
Between January and December, non-U.S. tweets jumped 13%, compared with 10% in the U.S. In February, month-over-month growth was 9% and 4% respectively, while it was 8% and 5% respectively in March.
Note: The overall growth numbers in the first graph are higher than the non-U.S./U.S. graph because they include Twitter users who did not disclose their location.
The behavior of Twitter users was also explored based on how long they had been using the service to understand Twitter's "stickiness". In particular, two groups were focused on: new Twitter users and more experienced users to glean insight into the activity of groups at opposite ends of the spectrum.
People who had been on Twitter for less than three months kept a steady presence, accounting for about 22% of total tweets in each of the past four months. This suggests that new users are sticking around and establishing a solid presence.
People who had been on Twitter for more than nine months increased their activity in a major way to 41.6% of total tweets in March from 26% in December. This suggests that as people spend more time on Twitter, they tweet more frequently.
The chart below shows the fraction of tweets contributed by users grouped by how they started using Twitter.
Sysomos offers two social media services: Heartbeat (monitoring and measurement) and MAP (analytics and in-depth reporting)