Twitter’s user growth ‘sees rapid decline’

Just as Facebook is apparently shedding users, Twitter now appears to be facing a popularity problem of its own – with growth in its monthly active users rapidly declining.

Reminiscent of the first-generation social networking king, MySpace, new research from Statista shows that Twitter’s user growth has decreased significantly over the last two years. The study shows that while recording global year on year growth of almost 150% at the beginning of 2011, Twitter finished 2013 at just 40% with an active user base of 241 million.

Comparatively, rival Facebook currently has 1.3 billion monthly active users – alongside Instagram’s 150 million and recently-acquired WhatsApp’s 450 million, which the social network purchased for a staggering $19 billion.

Explaining the decision to purchase WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said that services with the potential to reach a billion users are hard to come by.

It doesn’t look like Facebook will be looking to snap up Twitter any time soon then.