Comparing Social Network Activity Levels

On Monday, Twitter’s analytics team released some interesting numbers that shows their growth dating back to 2007. As you can see in the below graph, Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day.

This got me wondering how Twitter’s numbers compare to Facebook, and Google’s new platform….Buzz.

Just two days after Buzz launched, Google reported that the service had already received nine million posts and comments, and an additional 200 posts per minute via mobile phones. For its part, Facebook has a statistics page that says its users post more than 60 million status updates per day.

After looking at the math here is a comparison:

Updates/Posts

Facebook status updates: 60 million per day
Twitter tweets: 50 million per day
Buzz posts: 9 million per day

Some disclaimers need to be mentioned however:

• On Twitter, every post counts as a “tweet” no matter if it’s an original tweet, a comment from another user, a link being shared, a retweet, etc. All of those are rolled into one number.
• Facebook’s number is only status updates. It doesn’t include comments from other users on someone’s status update, nor does it includes “likes” of a status update — both of which are popular activities on Facebook. More importantly, it also doesn’t include photos, links, notes, and all the other types of user activity that happen on Facebook.
• Buzz was only two days old when Google published its numbers.

The difference in these 3 sites operate illustrates the challenge in trying to compare activity levels. However, if Facebook provided specific numbers about comments, likes, photos, links, and so forth — i.e., it would be significantly ahead of Twitter, despite the impressive growth in the numbers of tweets.