In today’s communication and education, social media are one of the most important factors, that make our job of communicating and informing a lot easier. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are one of the most popular ways of communicating, with Facebook being the first social media website. However, today we’re going to talk about Twitter, which was very popular a few years ago, and still managed to hold its own against the new social media apps like Instagram or WhatsApp. After this, you may ask yourself what is twitter and how does it work, and the answer to that question is just below.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online social networking service available for any platform from Windows to Android and iOS. The posts on this social media service are usually called “tweets”, and in these posts, users could write about anything or repost tweets from the other users. Tweets can sometimes contain #hashtags, which can help the user in search for various terms of interests.
History of Twitter and its Development
Twitter began as an internal service for Odeo employees and was initially developed by Florian Webber and Dorsey back in 2006. Shortly after that, Twitter became a social network where the users could post their pictures or any kind of multimedia, but in a different way from Facebook, which was then a well-known website. By the end of 2006, Twitter didn’t receive that much praise and popularity, but in 2007, Twitter usage increased to 60,000 tweets per day, from the 20,000.
From there, the company experienced a rapid growth in usage, counting a record of 400,000 tweets until the end of 2007. Years after 2007 were one of the most successful for the Twitter and in 2009, it became the third most-used social networking website. However, back in 2015 until now, Twitter reported that their popularity didn’t increase much, thus still having a small growth in terms of usage. As we speak, Facebook is still the most popular social media website, along with Instagram, and they both surpass Twitter in terms of usage.
Twitter Interface
From the first version of Twitter, this website underwent some minor and major changes in terms of overall look and performance. For easier search, Twitter added a search bar, where the user could type anything and see various posts related to that term. On top of that, there is a sidebar called “trending posts” where the most popular posts around the world can be seen. Also, some new languages are now added, and they include Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew and Farsi so the website can be used in 33 different languages. As we can see, Twitter improved its interface and overall user experience and is now far simpler and user-friendly.
Twitter usage
As we said, Twitter is a social-networking website, which means that anyone could access it. This applies to many other institutions or organizations that are trying to promote their business ideas and products. For example, Twitter can be used by law enforcement and many police officers use it to write about their daily routine or even give some information about crimes, which can help to increase the number of people involved in crime solving. This is useful because it makes the job of solving crimes easier, and the possibility of locating the witnesses or even suspect is a lot more possible.
Another good example of Twitter usage is education, as we mentioned earlier. Nowadays, many universities and schools have their own Facebook, Instagram or Twitter profile, and there are many profiles promoting education and giving the true information about anything that involves education. Users can now easily get to this information and take advantage of the Twitter’s possibility of usage even when not signed in. Politics also play an important role in Twitter’s usage, where the users can express their opinion on various political subjects or even protest. It’s proven that these protests can have an impact on real-life situations, which tells us that Twitter is a very powerful company.
Business is something that can be a lot more successful by using a Twitter. Many companies nowadays use Twitter to promote their work or products and these companies are usually the most popular smartphone or computer companies like Dell or Apple, which gained huge popularity on any social network. The other ways of using Twitter are for promoting sports and match results, news reporting or a television, where some of the TV shows are broadcasted live.
Twitter User Count
The number of Twitter users have been increasing steadily over time. Even though the growth has slowed down a bit, they are still holding a major share in the social media market. The below table shows the number of users over the years
| Year | Users (mm) |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 112 |
| 2018 | 121 |
| 2019 | 142 |
| 2020 | 192 |
| 2021 | 215 |
| 2022 | 232 |
| 2023 | 250 (projected) |
Twitter for Smartphones
Aside from being a website-only based service, Twitter developed apps for smartphones running on iPhone, Android, Windows 10 and Windows Phone. Unlike other Twitter alternatives, this made tweeting much easier and less complicated, and the user can also Tweet by sending SMS. Aside from the usual Twitter application, Twitter also developed an app called Twitter Lite, which is analog to Facebook Lite and is designed to take less space (usually around 1 MB) on a storage drive and use the less 3G internet. That’s the answer for your question, what is Twitter app.
Most Popular Twitter Accounts
When talking about the most popular Twitter accounts, there are some interesting facts. According to the newest information, the most popular Twitter account is Katy Perry, closely followed by Justin Bieber. They have 98,586,959 and 94,801,871 followers respectively, which is an impressive number. They even managed to be more popular than the Twitter itself, which has around 60,850,925 followers (The stats are from the date we publish this post.) Some of the most popular accounts besides them are YouTube, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Barack Obama.
While the Twitter may not be the most popular social-networking website, it sure holds its own in terms of popularity. Many actors, singers and other famous persons create a Twitter account as the main way of communicating with fans and announcing future plans, which make the Twitter a great website. It’s important to mention that Twitter is a little more explicit social media in terms of content, unlike Facebook, so it may not be suitable for use of children sometimes. Other than that, Twitter is easy to use and making an account is even easier. If you have a Facebook or Instagram account, feel free to try Twitter for the aforementioned purposes.