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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
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Twitter’s Growing Influence
September 08, 2009
We have all been aware of Twitter’s amazing growth over the past 6 months, including the impact that global celebrities (such as Oprah, Britney Spears, Ellen de Generes and Ashton Kutcher) have had on the uptake and membership of Twitter in March 2009.
Twitter’s phenomenal growth has also seen it become an increasingly influential part of the web landscape, driving discovery and sharing of a multitude of other websites as it grows. To measure the growing influence of Twitter I have reviewed the number of sites in the Upstream (websites visited before Twitter) and Downstream (websites visited after Twitter) clickstream to see if the growth is in line with the overall trends and if the number of upstream websites has been key to the market share growth of Twitter.
Last week Twitter hit an all time high in terms of All Categories ranking and market share, according to Hitwise Australia.. Twitter is now the 26th ranked website visited by Australian Internet users (week ending 5 September 2009) with a market share of 0.29%, now capturing more Australian visits than news.com.au (0.28%), RealEstate.com.au (0.28%), The Age (0.21%), AFL.com.au (0.18%) and Amazon.com (0.11%). Twitter’s share of visits and ranking maybe considerably higher when taking into account usage through the various desktop and mobile applications.
The chart below shows the increase in the number of websites, both before and after visiting Twitter, growing rapidly around the time of the Ashton Kutcher challenge to CNN to reach 1 million users (he now has over 3.4 million followers), overlaid with Twitter’s market share growth (on the secondary axis).
Click chart to view larger image.
Over the past 6 months the number of sites driving traffic to Twitter has increased 479% (comparing the weeks ending 5 September and 14 March 2009)while Twitter’s market share in visits has increased a similar amount, +460%. In the past month the growth continues with Twitter’s market share increasing 42% and the number of sites in the upstream clickstream also up 42% (week ending 5 September compared to week ending 15 August 2009).
Twitter drives downstream visits to over 17,000 downstream websites (17,166 in week ending 5 September 2009) with other Social Networking sites being the major recipient of visitors from Twitter (18.42% of downstream visits during week ending 5 September 2009).
As my colleague Heather Hopkins noted in May of this year in reference to the US market, “Twitter is being used as a social network and a means of distributing content. This is by no means the only way it is being used – just one standout trend.”
Photography sites (such as Twitpic), garnered 11.1% and Search Engines 6.8%, while Multimedia sites (4.9%), Blogs and Personal websites (4.6%) and Email Services (4.2%) all receive more of Twitter’s Clickstream than News and Media (Print), who receive 3.4%.
The following chart shows downstream visits by industry. The dark blue bars represent the parent industry, while the red bars represent sub-categories. For example, Photography is a sub-category of Entertainment.
The leading sites receiving traffic from Twitter in the table below are dominated by the other Social Networking sites and led by the photo sharing site Twitpic (www.twitpic.com), which itself has had a meteoric ride up the rankings on the back of Twitter’s success. In the past 12 months Twitpic’s share of visits has increased 248%%.It is currently the number three Photography site and ranked 208 across All Categories , according to Hitwise rankings (week ending 5 September 2009).
In the future there will be many websites that ride the coat-tails of another to success by providing a complimentary meaningful utility and service. What utility or service can you provide within Social Networking?
Posted by Alan Long at 04:14 PM
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- Twitter Performing Well In Australia (News: Everything-e)
Twitter fans should be pleased to hear that it's almost definitely taking over the world. U.S. stats [Read More]
Comments
Are there any figures on actual number of Australians using Twitter/have a Twitter account?
Glen
Posted by Glen | September 16, 2009 03:56 PM
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Margaret
Posted by Margaret | September 16, 2009 06:53 PM
Hey Alan, great post, also agree with Alistair above, Twitter API usage is a blackbox that could massively change the impact that Twitter is actually having.
Love to know if you/anyone can find out more.
Posted by Simon T SMall | September 25, 2009 10:17 AM
Could it mean the death of SEO slowly as people use Twitter to search and find content?
Posted by World Graffiti | October 24, 2009 03:38 AM
With the recent announcements that Tweets will be incorporated into both Bing and Google real time search products, it makes Twitter an important part of SEO strategies.
Posted by Alan | October 26, 2009 10:25 AM
Alan,
It is becoming common place for analysts around the world to report on the meteoric traffic growth of Twitter, with a footnote stating that it is/could be substantially higher due to desktop clients and other services using the Twitter API.
Are you able to share a year to date comparison of Twitter traffic comparing the web usage that is normally reported and 'all' - which would include the Twitter API used by desktop clients such as TweetDeck?
Al.
Posted by Alistair | September 14, 2009 01:03 AM