With the help of the Pope and President Obama, Twitter is now reporting that more than 200 million tweets are sent per day. 200 million is an impressive number on its own, but when you look at Twitter’s growth rate, it’s astonishing.
A year ago, users sent about 65 million tweets per day. In January of 2009, users sent just two million tweets per day. If Twitter continues to grow at this rate, users will send 20 billion tweets per day by this time next year.
In a Twitter blog post, the company gives a few more interesting stats.
- The world collectively writes a 10 million page book every day. (Or 8163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace)
- If you stacked up all of those copies of War and Peace, it would be as tall as the Tapei 101, the second tallest building in the world.
- It would take more than 30 years to read all the tweets sent in one day.
Compared to Facebook, Twitter is still a small website. Facebook users share about 30 billion pieces of content every month. Which according to my elementary math skills, is about a billion pieces of content a day.
So what was the world talking about on Twitter. Here are the top topics from the first half of 2011.
World events/News
- AH1N1 – Swine Flu
- Mubarak – former Egyptian President
- Easter – Christian holiday
- Cairo – capital of Egypt
- #prayforjapan – sentiment following the March earthquake and tsunami
- Chernobyl – site of nuclear disaster in 1986
- Libia/Libya – site of an ongoing civil war
- Fukushima – Japanese nuclear power plant
- William Kate – Newly-named Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
- Gadafi – Libyan political leader
Pop culture
- Rebecca Black – pop singer
- Femme Fatale – newly-released Britney Spears album
- Charlie Sheen – actor
- #tigerblood – hashtag popularized by Charlie Sheen
- Nate Dogg – rapper
- Anderson Silva – Brazilian mixed martial artist
- Tom Jerry – famous cartoon
- Mumford Sons – British rock band
- Bieber alert – referring to artist Justin Bieber
- Queen Gaga – referring to artist Lady Gaga
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