As far as Web services go, Twitter is pretty easy to use. Fill out a brief profile, follow some people and go, right? Well apparently not. Developers at the company have been fretting over the fact that some people still think Twitter is “too hard” to use.
But the solution has proved easy. By simply releasing mobile apps named “Twitter,” the company has seen a boost in new users.
Twitter announced today that the number of total mobile users has jumped 62% since mid-April, thanks to the release of Twitter for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. These apps existed before – Twitter for iPhone is just a rebranded version of the third-party client Tweetie – but they weren’t recruiting new users.
“We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all,” CEO Evan Williams wrote in a blog post titled “The Evolving Ecosystem” today.
Now 16% of new users sign up via mobile, versus 5% before the name changes. Almost half of all active users “make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience,” according to Twitter.
Despite the mobile push and recent speculation that Twitter’s clients have killed its Web site, 78% of users still access Twitter at least once a month via the Web.
Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile Web site are the top ways users access Twitter, followed by SMS and the official iPhone and BlackBerry clients. TwitPic, the photo-uploading service, and Google Friend Connect, the widget that lets websites feature content from social networks, are also in the top ten ways users access Twitter. Surprisingly, Twitter for Android was not.
The rest of the 300,000 registered Twitter applications have much fewer users, Twitter said. But Williams is encouraged by the growth and variety of apps in Twitter’s ecosystem. “These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities,” he wrote.
Twitter said it now has more than 145 million registered users, although the number of active users is lower.
How do you access Twitter?