Happy birthday, Twitter! The social network turned eight on March 21.
The brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, the site has grown by leaps and bounds since then.
Some facts and stats
- Originally named “twittr”
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- 2,700 employees around the world
- Available in more than 35 languages
- 21 March, 2006: first Tweet sent by Jack Dorsey
- August 2007: launch of the hashtag
- April 2010: launch of Promoted Tweets. Twitter starts providing an archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress
- March 2011: 1 billion Tweets sent weekly
- May 2011: Twitter acquires TweetDeck
– September 2011: 100 million monthly active users
– June 2012: new Twitter bird design
- January 2013: launch of Vine
August 2013: 500 million Tweets sent daily (1 billion every second day)
148 billion Timeline views
241 million monthly active users
– 36 million unique visitors to Twitter.com
- 184 million mobile monthly active users
80 percent of U.K. and Spanish users access Twitter from a mobile device. Other top countries: The Netherlands (72 percent) and France (68 percent)
7 out of ten accounts are located outside the U.S.
Most retweeted updates of all time: Ellen Degeneres’ celebrity selfie (3.4+ million RTs) and Barack Obama’s “Four more years” (780,000+ RTs)
Tweets-per-second record: 143,199 (August 2, 2013)
Most utilized Twitter features: hashtags, pictures, and Lists
– 60 percent of Twitter users follow a brand for customer service support
- 79 percent of users are more likely to recommend a brand they follow
9 out of 10 users follow brands to get discounts and promotions
40 million Vine users
(Sources: About Twitter page, We Are Social, eMarketer, Digital Marketing Ramblings, AllTwitter, Twitter’s Q4 2013 earnings report)
For more Twitter stats, read “Social media in numbers (January 2014)” and “(February 2014) By the Numbers: 116 Amazing Twitter Statistics” (Digital Marketing Ramblings)
Discover your first Tweet
This is my first Tweet. I joined Twitter on July 4, 2008.
Want to find out what yours was? Unless you have a great memory, head over to https://discover.twitter.com/first-tweet, enter your username, and you are set. And don’t forget to share!
You can also do it for everyone else.
