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Twitter touts growth, 100 million active users

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the microblogging service has a total of 400 million monthly unique visitors as well, reports Search Engine Land.

Don Reisinger
CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
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CEO Dick Costolo, seen here at Mobile World Congress in February, says Twitter's monthly active user count is up 82 percent since January. Stephen Shankland/CNET

Twitter has long said that its business is growing, but earlier today at a press conference at its headquarters in San Francisco, the company offered up a host of stats to prove it.

According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, whose comments were reported on by Search Engine Land, the service now has 100 million monthly active users worldwide. Out of that group, 50 million folks log in to the service every day, Costolo said.

Twitter's growth over the last several months has been nothing short of astounding. The firm reported, according to Search Engine Land, that its monthly active user count is up 82 percent compared to January 1, and it plans to add 26 million new monthly active users to its service in the next four months. It took Twitter four years--2006 to 2009--to add 26 million monthly active users.

Although that number is quite high, it helps put Facebook's monthly active user tally into perspective. According to that company, it has over 750 million active users worldwide. In addition, LinkedIn announced earlier this year that it has 100 million users, though the company didn't say how many are active users of the site.

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• Twitter: 140 million tweets per day and counting
• Beyonce pregnancy spurs tweets-per-second record
• Twitter CEO Evan Williams steps down

Twitter's latest stats come just a week after the company announced a new record for tweets per second. According to the firm, 8,868 tweets were sent out each second in the minutes following Beyonce's pregnancy announcement last month. It bested the previous high of 7,196 tweets per second when the service buzzed over the women's World Cup final between the U.S. and Japan.

Aside from those tweeting, Twitter also said today that it has 400 million unique visitors to Twitter.com, indicating that quite a few people come to Twitter to read tweets, but don't actually participate in the content creation. In fact, Costolo reportedly said that 40 percent of the service's active users haven't even tweeted in the last month.

Looking ahead, Costolo hopes to bring several improvements to Twitter, including surfacing more content to users and making it easier for those folks to find content from people they know, Search Engine Land said.

Costolo took over CEO duties at Twitter in October from co-founder Evan Williams. Prior to becoming to CEO, Costolo served as Twitter's chief operating officer.