Hitwise and Nielsen released some great numbers about social sites during the last few days. Here’s a part of what Nielsen has to say:
Twitter.com was the fastest-growing Web brand in May 2009, increasing 1,448 percent year over- year, from 1.2 million unique visitors in May 2008 to 18.2 million in 2009. Despite being the fastest-growing brand year-over-year, Twitter’s month-over-month growth has begun to slow, increasing 7 percent from April. The average time per person on Twitter increased 175 percent year-over-year, from 6 minutes and 19 seconds in May 2008 to 17 minutes and 21 seconds in May 2009. However, month-over-month growth was flat, decreasing one percent from April 2009.
According to Hitwise even though Twitter is a great traffic provider it delivers only a small portion of it’s traffic to transactional websites. Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter. Hitwise suggests Twitter as a communication tool for viral marketing.
One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. 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 transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.
