Twitter traffic increases 22-fold in 12 months
Traffic to Twitter, the online micro-blogging service, has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months, according to new data from Hitwise.
Last month, twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited site in the UK and the fifth most visited social network, compared to the 969th most visited website and the 84th most visited social network in May 2008.
Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, said: “Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about.
“The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it – 93% in fact – has occurred during 2009. Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.
“If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers could be even higher.”
Hitwise also found that Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK last month, accounting for one in every 350 visits to a typical website.
However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to online retailers’ websites, while 55.9% of traffic is sent to other content-driven media sites, such as social networks, blogs and news and entertainment sites.
Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to news, media and print websites in the UK during May, and all of the main newspaper websites now have multiple Twitter feeds.
“Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect,” Goad added.
“However, with one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which claims to have generated $3m via Twitter), very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. During May, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter.
“Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by those running the company if they are to make the service a financial as well as a popular success.”