Twitter has managed to rack up some rather impressive stats in honor of its fifth birthday.
For example, on March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the very first Tweet. Five years later, a staggering billion tweets are published every week, with daily tweets averaging 140 million.
In addition, a record 456 tweets per second (TPS) went live when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.
Less than a year later, the TPS record was broken again 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day by an impressive 6,939 tweets.
So, what’s next for Twitter?
Well, the company is currently consolidating its position in the lucrative social networking arena by exploring new revenue models, with a particular emphasis on small and medium businesses.
“Twitter has built an audience, but in order to achieve the scale and revenue that Google and Facebook are seeing it needs to show that marketing dollars spent on the site can perform well for mom and pops, not just big companies,” Jonathan Strauss, chief executive of Snowball Factory Inc., a company that tracks marketing campaigns on Facebook and Twitter told the WSJ.
To be sure, with a relatively new advertising campaign launched in 2010, the site is expected to generate around $150 million in ad revenue this year, up $45 million from 2010.
Part of this growth is expected to be from Twitter self-service advertising system that lets small businesses buy and run ads on Twitter much like Google AdWords.
Adam Bain, former News Corp-er and now president of global revenue at Twitter, explained that ads on the social networking site “can deliver value for any business, large or small, by giving them new ways to amplify their existing Twitter presence and accelerate awareness and conversations about their products.”
