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Twitter Gets Half As Much Press As Facebook

Twitter is getting almost exactly half as much press coverage as Facebook these days, according to Google Trends, even though U.S. searches for Facebook absolutely dwarf those for the microblogging service. Why are there so many more searches for Facebook? Because the social networking giant has 46 million active users in the U.S. Twitter's active user base, though undisclosed, is certainly several times smaller than that. Facebook also dwarfs Twitter in the unique user department. According to Compete, Facebook received more than 68 million unique visitors in January, compared to nearly 6 million for Twitter.

So why is Twitter getting so much press coverage? Google Trends can't explain that, but VentureBeat's Eric Eldon thinks the press corps is simply preparing for Twitter's "inevitable national domination." He's just kidding, of course, and presents another, more viable theory: perhaps the nature of "tweeting" is something that reporters "intuitively understand" and like to talk about--a lot. After all, reporters can use the microblogging service to ask questions for their articles as well as post links to their stories once they've been published.

The real question, Eldon points out, is whether all this press coverage will actually get the average person using Twitter more?

Read the whole story at VentureBeat »

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