Twitter proves major boon for media websites

Some interesting Twitter data from Hitwise that reveals what a boon the service is for media content sites in terms of driving traffic with newspapers in particular coming out winners.

Hitwise says that Twitter traffic has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months and a result of that increase is a leap in traffic to media websites (with newspaper sites and Twitpic amongst the sites benefiting), but not online retailers.

Last month Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK and accounted for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website.

More interesting is that 56% of that traffic is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.

That’s confirmation of what we all know and love about Twitter. It is a great place to break news and share links to good content (okay some of it – like this – might be your OWN content, but really there’s nothing wrong with a little self promotion as long as that’s all it is).

What isn’t happening according to the Hitwise numbers is masses of traffic going to transactional websites. Only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent this way.

That’s as it should be. Who wants Twitter to turn into QVC? You can tell people about stuff, but if they want to buy it, well, they’re mostly pretty smart and know how to use the internet.

Where there is transactional action going on (like Dell for instance), it is mostly opt-in, where people are signing up to follow Dell Twitter accounts when they are in the market for a new PC.

Hitwise contrasts these figures with other popular sites. Google UK sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook the figure is 14.7%.

The winners: newspapers and Twitpic

Hitwise has Twitpic down as one of the big winners to emerge in terms of traffic whether. It is definitely the site that you hear everyone mention first when talking Twitter and images.

In May Twitpic picked up one in every 13 downstream visits from Twitter with UK visits to the site up 250-fold over the last 12 months. This makes it the third most popular photo website in the UK behind Flickr and Photobucket.

For newspapers, many of which like the Guardian and the Times have multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to news and media – print websites in the UK during May.

The success here is finding the right level to engage with the community and to work that virally, but Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, makes a good point here in identifying that it is the journalists who are often the strongest asset rather than the official feeds.

“Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low retweet rates. Journalists tweeting themselves and engaging with the Twitter community typically have more success in creating viral stories,” Goad has said.

More Hitwise Twitter stats

UK Internet traffic to Twitter increased 22-fold over the last 12 months.
May 2009 Twitter was the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network
Vast majority of Twitter’s growth (93% of it) occurred during 2009.
May 2008 Twitter was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.

Although on the point  of Twitter only being the 5th most popular website Hitwise does not monitor third party apps like Tweetdeck, which many people use to access Twitter, which means Twitter in reality is not the fifth most popular site, but more likely to be the third most popular social networking site in the UK if not higher.

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