Study: Twitter has increased 22-fold in the past 12 Months & is UK’s Fastest Growing Website

Founded in March 2006, Twitter has emerged from a simple SMS service to the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform with over 19 million unique visitors from the United States in May, according to Compete. All thanks to President Barack Obama and several influential celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, Twitter has become a place for people around the world to share their personal lives encircling around the question “What are you doing?”.

According to a research made by the folks at Hitwise, a company which focuses on Internet usage, says that Twitter is currently touted as “UK’s fastest growing websites” and the “fifth most visited social network”. It has increased 22-fold in the past 12 months all thanks to the presence and influence of Stephen Fry (comedian), Cold Play (music band) and Downing Street. Without them, not many Britains would head to Twitter and join in the trend. Just a year ago, Twitter was ranked 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network. However, statistics from Hitwise has shown that the traffic has increased tremendously. In May 2009, it was crowned as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network. This is indeed a remarkable feat for the guys at Twitter.

If you’re observant, you would noticed that most of the tweets posted by users aren’t from the original Twitter website itself. A large percentage of them actually make use of third-party applications such as desktop clients or mobile phones to post their updates. These group of users are not even taken into consideration of the data provided by Hitwise which means that the numbers could be must higher than expected.

Other statistics provided by Hitwise includes:

– During May 2009, Twitter was the 30th-biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website.

– Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.

– However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to travel, business, finance sites and online retailers.

Despite Twitter’s phenomenal growth in both the United Kingdom and United States of America for the paste few months, however, Compete shows that the micro-blogging platform has grown by only 1.47% from April to May. Currently, Twitter is ranked number 36 in the world and has reached out to 1.7% of the whole world wide web with each user spending an average of 8.8 min/day according to Alexa.