I read a recent report from Bill Tancer who is the General Manager of Hitwise that the actual figures does not necessarily translate to the claimed success of Twitter based on market share.

Hitwise Manager showed some statistics that there is a significant decline in Twitter’s market share. The steady increases in visits and “Twitter” searches have significantly stopped to rise as of April, 2009 and it is now moving merely in an up and down fashion as shown in the graphs.

This means that Twitter is not gaining traffic as quickly as it did before and this is what Bill called “user saturation”. He attributed it to new user traffic. Since there is a decrease of new users from Twitter’s rise to popularity, the traffic rates are not growing as well.

If one will take the time to understand this, this means that Twitter is losing returning users. The market share is only the difference between new users and returning users. With this, can you imagine what will happen if the level of new users dropped significantly?

There is also the need for Twitter to address why there is a lack of returning users. I have interviewed some of my peers and some of them think that Twitter offers no use to them. They have tried it out but they do not see the importance of seeing small updates of other people. There is therefore a need to reiterate Twitter’s purpose.

I think this is a call for Twitter to increase the conversion of new users to loyal users. It seems like the majority of Twitter’s market share is only from new users. This may be treated as crucial information because of recent news on issues on Twitter funding.

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