The Smartphone Factor in Twitter Usage

Are more Twitter users going mobile? A recent TechCrunch article revealed that US Web traffic to Twitter dropped for the first time in October 2009. This story, backed by data from comScore, set off a new wave of speculation about Twitter’s future, including an excellent blog post by my colleague Debbie Williamson which looked beyond the traffic figures.

It’s worth adding a few points to that discussion. For starters, comScore wasn’t the first measurement firm to report a month-to-month drop in Twitter site traffic. Compete noted a slight drop in US traffic in September 2009, and another slight drop in October. The percentage decreases were minuscule, but what’s more interesting was the flattening trend since June 2009, following a period of sharp growth in the first half of the year.

Here’s what the graph looks like:

Even though the Compete data confirmed the drop noted by comScore (leaving aside discrepancies in the actual numbers), I agree with Debbie Williamson that there’s more to Twitter’s health than site stats.

As we’ve said before — and research from Crowd Science has confirmed — many users access Twitter on platforms other than the Web.

We’ve also noted a steep increase in smartphone sales and activity, and this is likely impacting how Twitter users access the service. According to Nielsen, Q3 2008 was the first quarter in which the majority (52%) of US mobile Internet users used smartphones to access the Web. A year earlier, only 41% of mobile Web users used smartphones.

Until we see more data about how people are accessing Twitter, we can’t know for sure whether the comScore and Compete traffic data are early indicators of waning interest in the service, or a sign that a migration is taking place from the wired Web to mobile devices. What do you think?