Twitter Wants To Go From 140 Million Users To 2 Billion

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on May 16th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Tweeting has become very ubiquitous in our lives but for some reason Twitter can’t seem to break out of its numbers slump. A couple months back there was talk that Twitter would break 500 million users but that prediction fell flat on its face.

We now know that Twitter really has around 140 million active users. This after Satya Patel, Twitter’s vice president of products made clear Twitter’s ambition to grow the user base to a staggering 2 billion users. He made the announcement of intent with a backdrop of Twitter seeing just over 340 million tweets a day from its 140 million users.

Scaling Twitter will require some rethinking about how the platform operates because at present many users complain that Twitter is not one of the easiest social networking platforms to use. This has occurred largely because Twitter has had to introduce new functions into the architecture in order to accommodate advertisers. Indeed Patel seems to agree with the need to keep thing simple, saying that, “We add via subtraction and look at how to reduce the number of steps to get value from the product. Consistency across devices is also important — you shouldn’t have to relearn the product for each device.”

My guess is that Twitter won’t break the 500 million active user mark anytime soon and it definitely won’t break a billion users before 2015. Unless Twitter can tap into emerging markets the way Facebook has, it doesn’t stand a chance of reaching its lofty goals.