Twitter now hits the UK Top 40

A year ago, Twitter was the 969th most visited website in the UK. One year later, by the end of May it was the 38th most visited website. Traffic has increased by a massive 22 times in the past year. There is no sign of that Twitter's growth is slowing down. And the evidence is there to show that this growth within the UK has really began to snowball since the turn of the year, identifying 9% of this last 312 months growth has came in 2009. The case is, it's growing even faster than the numbers suggest; if you allow for the use on browser enabled mobile phones and applications like Tweetdeck and Twitterific.

So with all this rapid growth, how is it affecting the balance of power within your market place? Obviously, the limitations of 140 characters per post have ensured that many tweets and retweets are pushing this traffic to other websites, but what types of websites are benefitting from the micro blogging phenomenon.
According to Hitwise, Twitter was the 30th largest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, this accounted for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. 55.9% of this traffic was sent to other content based online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment sites. In short, that's a lot of tweeting that is pushing people to read further information on another web property as a result of some form Twitter interaction. It seems only 9.5% of Twitter's downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites. In comparison, Google sends 30.7% of its UK traffic to transactional sites, and to put this into perspective further, this can be compared to our largest social network Facebook, where the figure is 14.7%. Putting these figures into real terms, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites in May than Twitter did. Obviously, a lot of effort will have to be put into tapping this huge, enthusiastic user base and turning them into profitable customers.

To address this properly, you should look upon Twitter as a viral form of distribution. If you look at the websites that have done particularly well from Twitter, the top beneficiary has undoubtedly been Twitpic; receiving 1 in every 13 visits that left Twitter in May. Photographs and images are engaging and easily digestible, they can say what can't be said in a 1000 words and perfect material to be retweeted in the form of a hyperlink. So in short it's not what you say, it's how you say it or "communicate" it that seems to matter.

Regardless of the quick adoption of Twitter by the main players in the Newspaper industry, official retweets are low in comparison to the amount of traffic that they actually receive from Twitter.

Twitter is now the 27th largest source of traffic to all News and Media - Print websites within the UK. It seems that successful online journalists are "going native" by tweeting themselves and engaging with the Twitter communities. They are taking a viral approach rather than using their corporate credentials to engage with the big name daily newspapers. It seems to be working in the young and naïve world of Twitter land; but watch this space Twitter may be big, however it's got a long way go before it is mature.