Twitter enjoys traffic boom

21st January 2009

Microblogging site Twitter has seen UK traffic to its website increase tenfold over the course of the last 12 months.

This is according to new figures from Hitwise, which reveal that Twitter was the 291st most visited UK site last week, compared with placing 2,953rd at the same time last year.

Robin Goad of Hitwise said in a blog post that it is likely traffic to the website is actually higher when traffic via mobile phones and third party applications are taken into account.

He attributed some of the success of the website to the fact that a growing number of high-profile names have opened a Twitter account in recent times, helping to boost the site's visibility.

"Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months," Mr Goad added.

In terms of all social networks in the UK, Twitter ranked 23rd for market share last week, with Facebook and YouTube taking the top two places.

Separate Hitwise figures for US web traffic show that Twitter overtook social bookmarking site Digg last week.