Twitter ‘fastest growing website in UK’
Wednesday, 25 Jun, 2009
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Micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter has emerged as the fastest growing major website in the UK in the past year.
Data from online research firm Hitwise shows that traffic to the site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months.
During May 2009 www.twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network.
A year ago, in May 2008, it was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network, according to Hitwise.
Research director Robin Goad 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."
One consequence of the high level of growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites, Hitwise said.
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.
More than half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.
But only less than ten per cent of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers).
By contrast, Google sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook the figure is 14.7%.
"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," said Goad.
"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."
Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to News and Media – Print websites in the UK during May, and all of the main newspaper websites now have multiple Twitter feeds.
Goad said: "The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community.
“Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible.
“Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates.
“Journalists ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community typically have more success in creating viral stories."
by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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