Breaking News (and Making News): Twitter Surges 131% in March to 9.3 Million U.S. Visitors!

Well, we might be about to do that again with the March U.S. Comscore MMX data released today, which shows that the number of visitors to Twitter.com jumped 131% in March to 9.3 million visitors! That’s 5 million more visitors than in February – a pretty astounding figure if you think about it. The chart below illustrates just how dramatic a jump it was:

Unique U.S. Visitors (000)

One interesting theory alluded to by several people in last week’s discussion was that the mainstream media attention on Twitter is really helping fuel its growth. And there may certainly be some merit to that. It seems you can’t get through a typical newscast anymore without some mention of Twitter.

If you watched the news this past week, you might’ve heard that Newt Gingrich levied criticism of President Obama’s response to the Somali Pirate stand-off over Twitter. I mean, we’re talking about the highest levels of government here, and a microblogging site is being used as a top politician’s primary media outlet?

It just goes to show you how much social media, and specifically a site like Twitter, has become woven into the fabric of our daily media lives. News broadcasters like CNN’s Rick Sanchez have actually incorporated Twitter into their live broadcasts, and it seems like just about every other journo these days has a presence on Twitter. We have also seen Twitter turn more average citizens into journalists, such as when when news and pictures of Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson broke on Twitter. Like it or not, Twitter is quickly revolutionizing the way our entire news ecosystem operates, from journalist to consumer, and blurring the lines in between.

Given the natural synergies between Twittering and news consumption, I wondered if Comscore data might confirm any overlap in behavior. (It might also go a long way towards explaining why we’re seeing so many older users on Twitter.) When I looked at the percentage of visitors to Twitter.com who also visited the websites of some of the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, I found a particularly strong level of overlap. The average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter.com visitors did so.

Cross Visiting Report of Twitter.com Visitors and Selected Leading Online News Sites

So these data firmly establish that there’s a strong relationship between Twitter users and news consumption. But the chicken-and-egg question continues to gnaw at me: Is it that the real-time "newsiness"of Twitter inherently attracts news junkies, or is it that the mainstream news attention on the site is pushing more and more news consumers to get on Twitter for the first time?

I tend to think it’s probably a little from Column A and a little from Column B. There’s some sort of virtuous cycle occurring between “breaking news” and “making news” that is feeding on itself, and it is only under such conditions that we can realistically see the sort of growth that we’ve seen at Twitter over the past few months. At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with for now.

What do you think?