Twitter Grows Astronomically, Gives Facebook a Run for its Money

A recent report published by Nielsen Online show that microblog, Twitter, is growing quickly—to say the least.  Mashable writes, “[t]he latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month”.  Twitter’s large growth stems from a variety of areas. For instance, companies and large brand names are appearing on Twitter, as well as a number of different celebrities.  The appeal of Twitter also comes from its simplistic format. Users can send tweets from their mobile phones, even if they do not have a web enabled phone (via SMS).

On another social media side, Facebook continues to take over the social networking sphere, as it continually surpasses MySpace.  Nielsen Online also reported that Facebook had a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus MySpace’s 54.1 million. Because of this ever-increasing gap, Facebook might look to Twitter as its newest competitor.  In fact, speculation on whether or not Facebook’s new look has something to do with seeing Twitter as a competitor are still relevant.