Nielsen: Twitter's growing really, really, really, really fast
A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing “member community destinations” in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen's survey caps a run of early momentum for the service — Twitter itself had flagged the opportunity in its February blog post on what the growth means, and Nielsen had already been a subject of attention in social media circles after its own viral moment in 2007. The 1,382 percent figure is the first hard third-party number confirming what insiders suspected: the microblogging upstart was the fastest-growing U.S. member community destination.
First-order effects
- Twitter gains third-party validation from Nielsen as the fastest-growing U.S. member community site, converting buzz into measurable audience data that advertisers and media buyers can act on.
- Brands and publishers watching the metric now have cover to experiment with the platform, since growth of this scale is exactly what early adopters cite when pitching internal buy-in.
Second-order effects
- Rival member-community destinations face pressure to respond to Twitter's trajectory, either by copying real-time short-form updates or by repositioning around engagement rather than raw signup growth.
- Audience-measurement firms like Nielsen become kingmakers in social media: whoever certifies the numbers shapes where ad budgets flow, raising the stakes on methodology.
Third-order effects
- The pattern here — explosive top-of-funnel growth ahead of any proven business model — foreshadows the arc the corpus later documents: by 2016 Twitter's total MAUs were flat at 320 million, and Pew found platforms growing users without growing engagement, suggesting hyper-growth headlines are a poor predictor of durable scale.
The trend: Social platforms' boom-phase growth metrics routinely outpace their eventual engagement and monetization curves, making early measurement claims an unreliable guide to long-term industry structure.