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The focus on digital media news this week has been all about Twitter. Online statistical monitors Hitwise showed that Twitter has climbed the online rankings in the UK, rising to the fifth most popular social network in Britain and the 38th most visited website.Twitter has come a long way in 12 months, when a year ago it had just broken into the top 1,000 most visited websites in the UK, now it sits comfortably in the top 50. Twitter shows no signs of slowing its ascent.
What is even more impressive is that the majority of Twitter’s growth has come in the last six months, with 93 per cent of growth occurring in 2009.
According to Hitwise’s head of research, Robin Goad, Twitter has become a very popular source of internet traffic for other websites. One in every 350 visits to a typical website in the UK is via Twitter, with nearly 56 per cent of this traffic being sent to online media sites, social networks, blogs and news content web pages.
Twitter’s failing at this stage is that it is not so good at converting traffic for online retail sites. Twitter has not been so strong at driving sales for retailers, with only 9.5 per cent of Twitter traffic going to transactional websites.
UK furniture retailer Habitat got burned this week by trying to force customers onto its website through Twitter when it used inappropriate hashtags in order to draw customers to bargain sales.
Habitat misappropriated hashtags with keywords such as iPhone, and Iran in order to boost their popularity, when the posts had nothing to do with these subjects. The Twitter community was outraged with the spamming tactic, causing a significant backlash against the furniture chain.
Online Advertising news posted by Benny Henson on 24 June 2009
