Forget search. I’m talking traffic. With all the hype about Twitter I believe some are getting a little unrealistic about it. Twitter search better than Google? Heart beat of the world? We will be the first with one billion users? How about, give me a break, Twitter is half way dead.

Let’s look at the traffic, and let’s look what Twitter has to offer. If you do, you will quickly see Twitter is way over rated. Does this mean Google wins the battle though? I don’t think so. There is another, and it does have the heart beat of the world, and the traffic to support my claim. We call it Facebook.

Looking at Some Public Estimates

Using Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast for some rough traffic estimates you can find a few clues pointing to a powerful force, Facebook.

Tweet This Reality

Looking at Compete.com’s view of Twitter you can see that Twitter’s exponential growth coming to an end. Alexa and Quantcast indicate this as well. Numbers still appear to be going up, but I am sure it will be a long battle to beat 50 million uniques a month. Without exponential growth it could take another year or more before they double their numbers.

Facebook’s Crushing Numbers

Looking at Compete.com’s view of Facebook you can see their growth is still going, and it’s still growing exponentially. At 120,000,000 estimated unique visitors per month it’s still growing, even faster that it did in previous months. Absolutely astonishing. Twitter is nothing in comparison, and there are actually some one month periods where Facebook grew by more than Twitter’s total audience.

Referring Realities

Twitter’s top referring site out of all of this? Facebook. You don’t need Google to find Twitter (though nearly 40,000 people search for it using Google everyday). Most sites get, borderline need, Google’s referring traffic, and not just for their site name. Most sites get Google traffic, to some volume, on all of their pages. Even this sites contact page has entry traffic from Google.

Twitter will never see this end trail type traffic that Google is so good at giving all of us, and most tweets will never be seen again. Google does index the tweets, but what are the odds a tweet will come up in your search for “Twitter Vs. Google”? A 140 character tweet saying it, or my nearly 1,000 word post with pictures. I’m  pretty certain Google will give me the lead here. That means on a whole,  Google will most likely send you to another site before they send you to an indexed tweet on Twitter.com.

Facebook I believe suspected this, and created their personal urls while changing their privacy policy at the same time. The end result? An indexed page by Google that most likely has way more than 140 characters. With that information alone, you can almost guarantee Twitter will never be able to compete with Facebook. But you say it’s soo easy to tweet your friends with Twitter? Umm, you can do that with Facebook, and I have more actual friends there. Another thing to consider is monetization. Whatever way Twitter can find a way to monetize, Facebook should be able to do it bigger and better because the site offers more with a larger audience.

Compete.com's top referring sites for Twitter

Compete.com's top referring sites for Facebook

If you spend the time visiting Alexa and Quantcast you will find very similar data reflecting Compete’s.

Facebook Now Using Google

Understanding that Twitter (though a good tool)  just won’t compete with Facebook, you can see that it’s all Twitter hype. I believe the only reason it has got as much televised press as it has, is because the media likes saying the word, “Twitter”. It’s fun and different.

Facebook on the other hand has a huge audience,  and it’s not coasting on a short term super media frenzy. It’s growing on it’s own merit, and by the most powerful social media tool there is, friends telling friends. They then slam dunked the deal for super power by leveraging the biggest power on the net, Google’s Index. By making users pages public (optionally), a super site is now getting even more traffic from Google. Google is feeding a giant that will soon out grow them.

It’s Getting Close

Right now, it’s getting very close between Google and Facebook. In six months or possibly even less we may have a new super power, Facebook. Looking at Compete.com’s numbers again Google is currently getting around 146 million uniques a month. That’s only 20 or so million more than Facebook, and Facebook is growing by 10 million a month, sometimes more.

Facebook should be bigger than Google. If you think about what the two sites do, it really should be obvious. Google is a tool to help us find information. Facebook is a tool for communicating and sharing. Where do you think most time is being spent? I am not a big Facebook user, but I know when I am on it, I can easily spend twenty minutes in one session. That’s a lot of interaction compared to a quick search on Google for that website you just heard about. What’s it called again? Twitter?

Think Facebook will out pace Google by the end of 2009? I certainly do. Think Twitter will break 50 million unique U.S. visitors a month ever? I’m thinking not.

Due to the insane amount of spam I get on this post, comments are now off.

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