SEO Blog

Following Heather’s post yesterday on Twitter overtaking Digg in the US, here is some UK data on the most talked about website of the moment: UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09 www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, the service 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. Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.

Over the last few weeks, a number of famous Twitter fans have helped boost the site’s UK profile. Stephen Fry, has over 50,000 followers, John Cleese can claim more than 30,000, and 2,000 people are following Andy Murray’s progress at the Australian Open. Jonathan Ross (13,000+ followers) has used the service to communicate with fans during his 3 month suspension from the BBC. The broadcaster – returning to British screens for the first time in three months this Friday (23/01/09) – has used his show business contacts to validate celebrity Twitter accounts, and is currently operating under the moniker “Number One Twitter Detective”.

Twitter receives the largest amount of its traffic from the USA, but its penetration is greater in the UK market. For the week ending 17/01/09 www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, accounting for 0.024% of all Internet visits; while in the USA it ranked 350th, picking up 0.020% of all Internet visits. However, the US may overtake the UK the week following the surge in Tweets during Barack Obama’s inauguration. The new American President is already the most followed person on Twitter, with over 144,000 followers.

Back in Britain, Twitter is still most popular with younger users in urban areas, but its appeal is broadening as it grows. The fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors to www.twitter.com.

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. Almost 10% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after Twitter. A further 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6% goes to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers. As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day. A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic.

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK. As we reported a few weeks ago, on Christmas Day Facebook received 1 in every 22 UK Internet visits. Its growth helped Hitwise’s Social Networking and Forums category account for 10.1% of all UK Internet visits during December – the first time that the industry has passed the 10% threshold. Twitter is also included in the category, and currently ranks 23rd.