According to Twopchart the number of Twitter accounts is now up to 465 million registered accounts and it will hit the 500 million landmark on Febraury 25th.

That’s around nine months after it passed the 300 million mark in May of last year.

The milestone for Twitter will come ahead, but not by far of Facebook hitting one billion users in the Summer. The social media numbers are getting seriously large.

Twitter passed the 400 million mark in the early autumn and as you might expect that growth has been accelerating. Twitter has effectively grown by more than 65 million accounts since autumn and Twitter wants that to continue as it tries to reach to consumers.

Not a surprise really. Social media itself is growing rapidly as more and more people read about it and jump on in for themselves. People of all shapes and sizes like Rupert Murdoch, for instance, who has been making a rather large splash since he signed up to Twitter on December 31. He was very splashy over the weekend with his Google pirate tweets.

Although it is worth keeping this in perspective as while Twitter will hit 500 million accounts, that is people who have signed up, that many of those accounts are in active or not tweeting (although many do use Twitter to monitor and listen rather than talk).

In October Twitter told us that while it might have around 400 million registrations it only had 100 million active users, according to CEO Dick Costolo.

It also has to be remembered that the 500 million Twitter accounts figure will also include armies of spots and spammers. No one knows how many of those are out there, but it feels like a lot.

However, Costolo did also say at the time the number of global active user numbers had grown tremendously in 2011 as logins per day surged: “We had 30% of our monthly active users login in every day at the beginning of the year. Now it’s over 50%,” Costolo said.

Spammers aside this is a big moment for Twitter and it is safe to say that by the end of the year its total user numbers will close on 750 million giving it a billion uses sometime in 2013.