Mapping Meerkat’s Explosive Growth
Let’s start with some figures.
Since Meerkat dropped on the app store on February 22, the app has been mentioned on Twitter over 60,000 times. 20% of those mentions have come from the last 24 hours.
More than half of all these mentions are of new broadcasts. The phrase ‘|LIVE NOW|’ has been broadcast on Twitter over 32,000 times.
An estimated 5,500 broadcast tweets were tweeted yesterday alone.
Meerkat is growing, and it’s growing fast.
A Quick History
For those unfamiliar with the newest social app to dominate home screens, Meerkat allows you broadcast live video via Twitter in a matter of seconds.
By using Twitter’s network for chat and broadcast notifications, the app took off for its speed of use.
It was so popular, Twitter had to shut it down for an afternoon.
When Meerkat launched on February 22, it was only attracting a few users a day.
After TNW covered the app on Feb 27, the usership skyrocketed.
Since the media caught on to Meerkat, the number of people launching broadcast has risen from a handful a day to hundreds an hour. At peak times, new broadcasts hit Twitter up to 500 times an hour.
It’s hard for people to ignore this exceedingly high growth rate. Everyone — from individuals to megacorporations to Meerkat themselves — are figuring out how they can use this powerful tool for broadcast in interaction.
As the newsfeed has sped up, we’ve seen a decline in the ‘Twitter Q&A’. Meerkat lets important people connect with their fans/disciples in an instant and meaningful way.
Even though Meerkasts fly by in an ephemeral space, we’re still likely to see it co-opted by savvy marketers. Snapchat went through the same explosion of popularity and now some of the best Snapchat accounts are corporate.
Data for this story was captured by Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool. For more graphs and analysis of social stories, check out our blog.
