14 DAY TRIAL // MySpace has never been particularly well received outside of the US and it has never gained nearly as much popularity or market share as in its country of origin. Twitter on the other hand has been growing fast in the US but also worldwide and is especially popular in countries like the UK. Even so, it is interesting, though not totally unexpected, to see that Twitter managed to overtake MySpace in the UK in raw traffic – the number of visits – last week for the first time.
The numbers come from analytics firm Hitwise and they show that in the week ending on the 29th of August Twitter got one out of every 400 Internet visits in the UK, or 0.25 percent of the market. The percentage is the same for MySpace, which has been on a downward spiral for the past two years. Twitter on the other hand has seen huge growth this year, on par with the rest of the world. Based on the traffic numbers for last week Twitter is now the 27th most visited site in the UK.
“If anything, Twitter is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher. Of course, MySpace also picks up a significant amount of traffic outside of the MySpace.com domain, particularly via mobile platforms,“ Robin Goad, research director for Hitwise UK, explains.
When looking at just social networking sites, Twitter is now the fourth most popular in the UK, just edging out MySpace, but with each having around 2.21 percent market share they're hardly a threat. While Twitter may be increasingly popular in the British Isles, the numbers show there's only one social network clearly dominating the field and that is Facebook, which enjoys more than 47 of the market, followed by YouTube, with 16.6 percent, though some might argue that the video sharing site, while having clear social features, isn't exactly a social network like Facebook or Bebo, the third most popular.