eMarketer said Twitter will have12.1 million US users in 2009 and 18.1 million in 2010.
eMarketer on September 16, 2009 estimated that "US Twitter users will grow 200% in 2009, according to eMarketer estimates, with growth slowing to a still-impressive 44.4% in 2010."
A recent study of 40,000 users by Rapleaf shows how the most popular users on Twitter grew in popularity on Twitter. The popular get more popular,
"20 percent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State. People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services," said Jansen. "Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services."
Jansen, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro-communicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.
The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned -- to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else -- and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products."
Jansen, B. J., Zhang, M, Sobel, K, and Chowdury, A (Forthcoming) Twitter Power: Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth. Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology. Twitter as Electronic Word of Mouth
Impact of Twitter:
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