Facebook may be the subject of all of the headlines, but another major player in the social networking space is reminding the world that it’s still growing too.
Twitter, which has built a company that one day might go public too on the back of 140 character messages, has waived its hands in the air by announcing that it has surpassed 140m users worldwide.
10m of those users are in the UK. That’s good enough to make the UK Twitter’s fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan, and explains why the company has a 30 person strong office in London.
Although Twitter’s userbase can’t compete with Facebook’s, the service’s impact on society has arguably been nearly as significant, and in some areas, perhaps even more significant.
Like Facebook, Twitter has a front-row seat to the mobile revolution. According to the company, some 80% of British users who used Twitter in the past month did so using a mobile phone. Obviously, Twitter’s service, which was inspired in part by SMS, is more easily adapted to a mobile experience than, say, Facebook’s, but in terms of monetisation, which Twitter has taken slowly, the dramatic rise of mobile usage is clearly going to present challenges for Twitter too.
