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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Twitter accounts for 1 in every 184 UK Internet visits online

May 23, 2011

Twitter just keeps on growing, reaching another new peak in UK Internet traffic this weekend on Saturday 21 May. The site experienced its highest ever volume of online traffic on Saturday, accounting for 0.54% of all UK Internet visits that day, or to put it in simpler terms: Twitter was responsible for 1 in every 184 Internet visits in the UK on Saturday.

Twitter has been in the news a lot recently, and that’s mainly because Twitter has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news. The political revolution in Egypt, the Japanese earthquake and the celebrity super-injunctions are just three big news stories from the last few months that have been shared, spread and commented on through Twitter.

Within the growth of Twitter, 12% of visits to the website are coming from new users. To put that into context, 99.5% of visits to Facebook in the UK come from returning visitors, but Twitter continues to attract new users to its website every single day. Facebook is clearly much bigger than Twitter (about 15 times bigger in terms of volume of visits) but Facebook’s growth in terms of new visitors (in the UK market at least) has been pretty static for some months now.

As Twitter continues its extraordinary growth, one thing that is interesting is that the micro-blogging platform is becoming more mainstream in terms of its user base. Using Mosaic we can see the types of people that visit Twitter online.

You can see that visits to Twitter in May 2011 (the red line) are much closer to the UK online population average (the blue line) than they were in May 2010 (the green line). In particular Twitter relies less on visits from Liberal Opinions, New Homemakers and Upper Floor Living – groups which are characterised as young, mostly single people who like their gadgets. Twitter is no longer purely in the domain of early-adopters; rather it is becoming a universal tool which is being used increasingly by all types of Internet users, regardless of their online preferences.

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Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 03:51 PM | (0)
In Categories Social networks | Twitter