Twitter has seen UK traffic grow 93% in the first half of 2009 as popularity of the micro-blogging site escalates, according to Hitwise.

During May, Twitter ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network, compared with May 2008 when it was the 969th most visited site and 84th most visited social network.

The research also found Twitter is the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for one in every 350 site visits on average.

Over half (55.9%) of trafic from Twitter is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs and news and entertainment sites. However, just 9.5% of Twitter's downstream traffic is sent to transactional sites.

Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, said, "Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high-profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.

"If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we're only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website," he added. "If we included people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third-party applications, such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck, the numbers could be even higher."

Source: NMA

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