Twitter traffic increases 974%

Traffic to Twitter has increased by 974% year on year, according to Hitwise UK.

The micro-blogging social network was ranked as the 291st most-visited website in the week ending 17 January 2009, while a year ago it ranked 2,953rd.

The amount of traffic Twitter sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months. Some 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, 14.6% to social networks, and nearly 10% to news and media websites. Just 6.6% of traffic goes to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites in the UK and if anything, the service is even more popular than the numbers imply as Hitwise only measures traffic to the main Twitter site. If people access their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third-party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck), the numbers could be even higher!