Twitter users might have noticed an unusual amount of new followers in the month of March. While it could be accounted for by a surge of personal popularity, chances are good that it's a reflection of how quickly the microblogging service is growing.
According to the March U.S. comScore Media Matrix, data gathered shows that the number of users who visited Twitter surged by 131 percent over the course of the month to 9.3 million. That number reflects growth of 5 million users over the previous month of February.
Writing for comScore, Andrew Lipsman, marketing communications manager and senior industry analyst, believes that a lot of the growth the microblogging service saw in the past month is a result of the growing number of mentions that Twitter gets in mainstream news these days.
"It seems you can't get through a typical newscast anymore without some mention of Twitter," wrote Lipsman.
And it may be those mainstream news mentions that are feeding Twitter's growth. Lipsman goes on to discuss the likely correlation that exists between news junkies and Twitter users who tend to use the service to find information.
"When I looked at the percentage of visitors to Twitter.com who also visited the Web sites of some of the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, I found a particularly strong level of overlap. The average Twitter user was often two and three times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person," Lipsman wrote.
"Like it or not, Twitter is quickly revolutionizing the way our entire news ecosystem operates, from journalist to consumer, and blurring the lines in between," Lipsman wrote.
While the microblogging service is often used for self-promotion and marketing purposes, it is just as frequently used to share news and information. As news like the landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River continues to break on Twitter, mainstream news organizations will have to continue to mention the service. And those mentions will serve to continue fueling the growth of the site, likely showing similar increases in traffic like the one seen in March.
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