Facebook‘s growth in the U.S. will drop for the first time to the single digits this year, but Twitter‘s presence will expand by 20% or so, according to a report.
EMarketer estimates that Facebook grew 13.6% in 2011, which comes after a 38.6% surge in 2010. By contrast, Twitter grew 31.9%, which comes after a 23.5% jump in 2010. The relative growth numbers are greatly influenced by the respective sizes of the networks. At the end of 2011, Facebook claimed nearly 133 million U.S. users out of a total population of around 308 million. Twitter had a U.S. user base of 24 million.
However, while Facebook’s growth seems to have hit a plateau, Twitter’s size will double by 2014, eMarketer predicts.
Though eMarketer’s figures are merely estimates, it’s no secret that Facebook’s U.S. growth has slowed of late. However, the social network is still expanding rapidly in other countries. For instance, it grew 192% in Brazil from December 2010 to December 2011, according to comScore. Expansion in that country, as well as India, is expected to propel Facebook’s global audience size to 1 billion this August, according to one analyst.
Twitter, meanwhile, hit the 200 million mark last July. In January, Semiocast claimed that there were 383 million Twitter profiles worldwide and 28.1% of them — 107.7 million — were based in the U.S. Brazil was the number two county in the study with 33.3 million accounts.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, akinbostanci
Source: Mashable
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