Twopcharts: Twitter users are expected to exceed 500 million in February 2012 and reach 900 million by the end of the year

According to the latest research report released by Twopcharts, an independent Twitter account tracking agency on January 17, 2012, the number of registered Twitter users will exceed 500 million by the end of February this year, reaching 900 million by the end of the year, and the number of active users will reach 250 million.

In August last year, Facebook's active user count exceeded 1 billion, equivalent to about 14% of the world's total population. According to Facebook's definition, members who log in at least once a month are classified as active users. Although such a frequent login status is hardly considered active, it has basically become an industry standard.

In contrast, Twitter has surpassed 100 million active users, using the same criteria as Facebook. This was Twitter's official data released in September last year. Obviously, Twitter's user base has been growing since then, as there is no reason to believe that this number will shrink or stagnate.

Last April, Katie Stanton, Twitter's vice president of international strategy, announced that the number of registered Twitter accounts reached 200 million. Twopcharts, an independent Twitter account tracking agency, announced in May last year that the total number of registered Twitter accounts was 300 million. In August, the number rose to 362 million, and two months later it broke the 400 million mark. Twitter also confirmed that its number of unique users reached 400 million in September.

The number calculated by Twopcharts has now grown to 462 million and is still increasing. At this rate, this means that the number of Twitter registered accounts has increased by 100 million in less than 5 months. According to Twopcharts's forecast, the number of Twitter registered accounts will reach 500 million in 44 days and 10 hours, which means that Twitter should achieve this milestone on February 26, 2012.

However, it is worth mentioning that this is the total number of registered accounts on Twitter, including all abandoned and terminated accounts. As a whole, it only reflects how many people have registered as Twitter members so far, but this data is still of great value.

For example, given the relationship between these data in September last year, we can roughly estimate the number of active users Twitter has now. In that month, Twitter had 100 million active users and about 362 million registered accounts, which means that about 28% of Twitter's registered members are active users. This means that Twitter's active users have now reached 127 million (calculated based on 27.6% of the 462 million registered accounts), and this number will rise to 138 million by March this year.

In fact, Facebook had 750 million active users in September last year, and the number of registered users is likely to reach 1.875 billion. Therefore, Facebook's current number of registered users should be 2 billion, and it will exceed 2.5 billion in August this year, which means that about 37% of the world's population has registered a Facebook account.

By comparison, Twitter's registered user base should reach around 900 million by the end of 2012, and its active user base will exceed 250 million. Although there is still a big gap compared to Facebook, Twitter's user base is still very impressive.