14 DAY TRIAL // For those who just can't get enough Twitter statistics, research firm Hitwise has released a new set of data with some interesting tidbits. While Twitter's growth in the recent months is hardly surprising to anyone, some details of the report offer a new perspective on how Twitter users behave and what the micro-blogging site is used for.
The study focused on the UK market where Twitter has increased its traffic 22 times in the last year, making it the 38th site in Britain and the fifth social network. Another piece of information that was pretty much expected is the fact that the site has seen the majority of its growth, a full 93 percent of it, in 2009. These figures, as with other reports, only include visits to Twitter's home page and not the ones from mobile phones or desktop clients, so the number of visitors is likely higher than the one calculated.
Interestingly, though, Twitter has become a huge source of traffic for many sites, making it the 30th largest source in the UK, with one out of every 350 visits to a UK site coming from the social network. Also somewhat interesting, though predictable, is the fact that most of the traffic coming from Twitter, 55.9 percent of it, goes to other content-centric websites like social networks, blogs or media sites, while only 9.5 percent of it goes to commercial or transactional sites like online retailers or business sites. Google UK, on the other hand, the country's biggest traffic source, sends 30.7 of it to commercial sites, while Facebook, the number-one social network in the UK, 14.7 percent.
The most popular destination from Twitter is the photo-sharing site Twitpic, which is dedicated almost exclusively to the micro-blogging site. In fact, Twitpic is now the third largest photo-sharing website in the UK after Flickr and Photobucket.