Apparently we are currently tweetering (sorry!) on 50 million tweets per day! That’s almost 600 tweets per second!

At its launch in 2007 Twitter had an average of 5,000 tweets a day.  By 2008, this had grown to 300,000.  By 2009 it reached 2.5 million per day.  So that’s 2,000% growth rate since January 2009!

These enchanting growth figures, however, need some interpretation as they represent total traffic.   Kevin Weil (Twitter analytics team), wrote on the company blog, “Tweet deliveries are a much higher number, because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers.  Then there’s search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across the information network. “  Whilst, according to comScore (a marketing research company) in January 2010, Twitter’s site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals.

Nevertheless,  Sean Garrett (vice president of communications at Twitter) claims that 20 per cent of all tweets, that’s roughly 120 tweets every second and growing, “contain a reference to a product or brand.”

Phil Stewart, of Virgin Media Business, compounds these figures with a warning.  Published in last months Computer Business Review, Stewart reports that whilst 57 of the UK’s top 100 companies have Twitter accounts (most likely only to avoid cybersquatters), only 28 of them are using Twitter to chat with their customers.  Stewart claims that this failure to use twitter could cost these companies dearly.  Twitter, he argues, “presents an excellent opportunity for companies to engage with customers.”  He continues, “… not responding to tweets by your customers is no better than opening a contact centre and not picking up the phone … [this is being] viewed by millions.  Companies should respond to customer enquires and take part in conversations about their brand …”

Still not sure about Twitter?  Twitter has @CleverAccounts – with the bio:

Follow us to learn about interesting uses of Twitter from across the world. @mention us if you have your own use case!

If you prefer an RSS feed to tweets then Twitter also posts these @CleverAccounts tweets on Posterous (“the dead simple way to put anything on-line using email“).  The page is called Clever Twitter Accounts (and, the RSS feed  is here).  The @CleverAccounts Posterous tag line? ‘Twitterers that make you say, “Now I get it!“‘ Do you?