Breaking records, adding new features, bringing in solid revenue streams: these are just some of the things that happened with Twitter in 2011. Twitter also became a major outlet to push viral media to the masses quickly, as seen across the globe in riots, protests, and through major media outlets.
“Twitter turned five years old in July, but it hasn’t stopped growing with records being broken repeatedly throughout 2011.” — The Next Web
Some of those records include tweets per second, and twitter there are now over 200 million tweets per day posted to twitter. This is all done by over 100 million active montly users, “55% of them accessing [Twitter] via mobile devices.”
With the extreme growth Twitter opened new datacenters and expanded its international and US presence. Twitter opened offices in the UK and Ireland, a new office in New York City, and appointed a manager strictly for Twitter in Japan.
Along with this huge growth came some major changes to Twitter. Twitter began hosting images for users and allowing direct uploading from the Twitter site. Twitter launched a huge site overhual dubbed “New New Twitter” in December, bringing about Connect and Discover tabs to simplify everything.
See our article about ‘New New Twitter‘.
One of the biggest stories for Twitter was the integration of Twitter into iOS with Apple. Twitter’s image sharing and account signups have boomed since Apple announced this social game changer.
Twitter also helped shaped the global landscape in a different way. Twitter was there in many conflicts with protesters and rioters across the world, causing social media censorship to be brought up on multiple occasions. Many media outlets began using Twitter to release information to the public, getting information to the people faster than ever. Many countries and companies tried using bans and injunctions to slow down the viral leak of stories on Twitter.
As Twitter is still a business seeking to make a profit, Twitter has altered its promoted services. Now promoted tweets are placed directly into users’ timelines, and Twitter is slowly rolling out self-service advertising. Twitter ads are not cheap, with reported costs of $120,000 per day for a Promoted Trend, but execs claim 80% of customers repeat business.
With all that went on in 2011, Twitter has set a bright future in 2012. Can Twitter hold onto the top spot for breaking news across the web? Can it keep its revenue stream rolling in? This next year should be exciting for Twitter and the rest of the social media world.