Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

As the following chart illustrates, the growth has been slow and steady with an acceleration in the past few weeks.

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites. Twitter's size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular). However, the website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service still hasn't reached mainstream adoption. We blogged about this last year, reaching a similar conclusion.

I looked at Hitwise clickstream data and it appears that Twitter is building on a loyal user base. The site's top sources of traffic last week were Social Networks and Forums, Email Services and Search Engines. The importance of search engine traffic has been declining over the past year. Using our new and returning visitor filter, I was able to see that 71% of visits from Search Engines are from new users compared to 33% and 38% respectively for Social Networks and Email Services. By and large, new users come from search engines whereas repeat users come from other sources. The decrease in visits from search indicates that the site is maturing - but still growing. As more and more of the user-base is made up of repeat users less and less of the traffic will come from search.

Whilst Twitter continues to be a niche website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. Clickstream data helps us to understand that this growth is both from new users and repeat visitors. This is good news for Twitter and we'll continue to watch this site.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.

Image By herbstkind