Remember when Twitter hit that dangerous growth slump? Maybe not. It was at its worst about a year ago and nobody at the company, especially co-founder and then-CEO Evan Williams, wanted to talk about it.
Things aren’t looking so gloomy anymore.
Twitter now has 175 million registered users, up from 145 million in early September and 105 million in April. If, between April and September, the site was adding around ten million members monthly, Twitter is now seeing 15 million members joining the site each month.
Of course, if we attribute the current amassing of users to the Twitter redesign (#NewTwitter), the rate of new registrants won’t stay that high. Twitter has seen three major growth spurts in the last couple years and each can be directly assigned to individually significant site developments.
Twitter’s first growth spurt, in early to mid-2009, was a direct result of widespread media coverage of the site, which initially sprung from high-profile celebrity tweeters like, most famously, Ashton Kutcher. The pandemonium of tweets swirling around the Iranian election protests and Michael Jackson’s death only fueled media reports on the young news-breaking microblogging site.
By the fall, however, the site hit a serious growth slump and even the company’s executives seemed legitimately worried. It wouldn’t be until the following spring, when Twitter got serious about its smartphone offerings, with the launch of official iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps, that new registrations would flow like a flood again. (Twitter had its official Windows Phone 7 app available on launch day.)
And now, the site is growing like crazy again and it’s all because of the site redesign. But what comes next?
What can Twitter do now to attract more users? It’s more than a little doubtful that Promoted Products will bring new users in droves, but that feature is meant to attract advertisers, not users. (Actually, Twitter has to very careful to keep Promoted Products relevant for users, or else they run the risk of actually losing users.)
More realistically, the products of Twitter Hack Week could be cool enough to spark the interest of new users. Last week, Twitter engineers were told to hack away at whatever features they wanted to implement on the site. No word yet on what they made, but we eagerly await their public debut.
