Money Matters, Simplified.
Mobile apps drive growth at Twitter
by Jamie Anderson - September 4, 2010 - comments
Twitter has grown phenomenally since April this year, primarily on the strength of a swath of new mobile applications.
Twitter Inc., the microblogging service, has registered a spike of 27 percent in users since it has made the service easily accessible on mobile devices.
The San Francisco based company can now boast of 145 million registered users, up from the 105.8 million user base that it had in April this year.
During Twitter’s Chirp developer conference in April, the company had divulged that it was working on developing applications that would make it easier to use Twitter on mobile devices.
Various apps developed
"This strategy has been quite successful. The number of mobile users has jumped 62 percent since mid-April,” Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams wrote in his blog post.
The CEO also divulged that, beginning April, 16 percent of new subscribers started tweeting on mobile devices, vis-à-vis the earlier 5 percent before the efforts to simplify mobile access were implemented.
“We've been seeing strong growth in both of these areas. “We still have lots of room to grow and improve. We look forward to seeing what’s next,” maintained Williams.
"As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter, and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users. Indeed, 46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience," Williams wrote.
Twitter has also worked and developed an application for Android devices. Furthermore, the company, in connivance with Research In Motion, has developed a BlackBerry application. Also, Twitter’s recently released iPad application has received good reviews.
“We understood we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms.So we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry and Twitter for Android.
Williams averred that better visibility and effortlessness in use of specific Twitter apps was instrumental in attracting and retaining users.
Division of users
Mobile applications may have helped spurt growth, however till date, 75 percent of the Twitter users still log on to Twitter.com.
On the other hand, m.twitter.com, the mobile browser version of the service is used by around 14 percent of the subscribers only.
Eight percent of the Twitter subscribers used the service on the iPhone while close to 3 percent of the subscribers used TweetDeck, an application for desktop computers.
“As this data shows, while smartphone clients are important, there are even more people who use the mobile Twitter web site and/or SMS,” wrote Williams.
“We've been seeing strong growth in both of these areas. “We still have lots of room to grow and improve. We look forward to seeing what’s next,” maintained Williams.