Musk claims Twitter hits all-time high user engagement, numbers speak otherwise

Worldwide visits to twitter.com dropped 7.3% year-over-year in March, the third straight month of declines, according to Similarweb estimates

New Delhi: Despite tall claims by Twitter owner Elon Musk, the micro-blogging platform is witnessing a decline in user engagement as well as traffic.

Musk on Saturday tweeted that the “platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week”. The Twitter owner has made such claims in the past too. In April, as part of a BBC interview, Musk said the social media service was seeing record user engagement, and that major advertisers were returning.

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However, according to web analysis site Similarweb, its monthly report on traffic to the social media ad portals saw an 18.7 per cent year-over-year drop for Twitter in March.

Worldwide visits to twitter.com dropped 7.3% year-over-year in March, the third straight month of declines, according to Similarweb estimates. Twitter’s unique visitor count on the web dropped 3.3 per cent year-over-year in March. For the Twitter Android app, average daily active users were down 9.8 per cent in March and monthly active users were down 8 per cent (both year-over-year).

One of Musk’s specific claims — tweeted in March and repeated in the BBC interview — is that Twitter now commands more than 8 billion minutes of user time per day, which he said is a new record. We couldn’t find any evidence that Twitter’s previous management ever reported that particular metric and it’s not one we can either confirm or dispute,” according to Similarweb.

Over the past couple of years, traffic to the website has been fluctuating from month to month, but with no consistent pattern of growth. Over the same period that Twitter has been losing web traffic, app usage has also been trending down.