Twitter has more than 145 million registered users, with mobile users jumping 62 percent since April after the company began offering its own mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams published a rare state-of-the-company stats blog post Sept. 2, highlighting the company’s and platform’s growth since it held its first Chirp developer conference in April.
For example, along with the mobile user hike, 16 percent of all new Twitter users start with a mobile client, compared with 5 percent before the company launched the Twitter mobile client. Some 46 percent of active users “make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience,” Williams said.
Williams emphasized how the use of Twitter from mobile apps has soared since the company launched Twitter for BlackBerry and acquired Atebits to create Twitter for iPhone before Chirp.
The company launched Twitter for Android two weeks after the conference. Twitter released Twitter for iPad Sept. 1.
Williams’ stress on mobile apps seems geared to prove the value of Twitter’s mobile strategy after several third-party Twitter developers questioned whether writing apps for the platform was still viable.
Programmers felt that with Twitter doing its own work to augment that platform and, by extension, the company’s fledgling business model, the company was cannibalizing third-party apps.
Williams argued at the time that finding Twitter apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android was a tedious task because none was called Twitter. Users had to work a little to find a client such as TweetDeck or Twidroid.
“We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms,” Williams said. “So we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry and Twitter for Android, which launched a new version this week.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Williams noted that Twitter’s mobile “strategy has been quite successful.” To wit, Twitter has gleaned some interesting stats from its millions of users.
While Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for BlackBerry are popular access points for the microblog service, Twitter for Android doesn’t even rate on the company’s list of top 10 applications people have used to access Twitter in the last 30 days.
Some 8 percent of Twitter users tweet from the iPhone app, with 7 percent accessing the BlackBerry app.
That compares to 14 percent of those who use the mobile Twitter client, 8 percent who access it from SMS and a whopping 78 percent who access Twitter from their desktop.
Third-party clients such as TwitPic and TweetDeck were used by 3 percent of users.