Twitter traffic according to Hitwise

Hitwise has published over the last days three posts with interesting information on traffic to the Twitter website. They analysed traffic to twitter.com in three countries : UK, USA and Australia.

Let's start with the UK. Twitter.com is the 291st most visited website in the UK. Internet traffic has increased by 974% over one year, see the graph below.



Hitwise does only taken direct traffic to twitter.com into account. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

There are also a few figures on downstream traffic, on what type of links do Twitter users click on :
17.6% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to entertainment websites,
10% of goes to News and Media websites,
14.6% goes to social networks,
6.6% to blogs and finally
4.5% to online retailers.

A few days earlier an analysis of Twitter traffic in the USA was also published. According to Hitwise, Twitter.com attracks more visitors than Digg. Twitter is ranked #84 in computers and internet category, one place before Digg, ranked #85.



Traffic to Twitter from Australia has also grown significantly, 517.9% up over one year, as shown on the graph below.

TwitterFriends

Twinfluence was one of the first services offering metrics to quantify the influence of a Twitter user.

TwitterFriends goes a step further, by offering more metrics and additional information for individual Twitter users.

This is the list of metrics calculated by TwitterFriends.

• Size of relevant net (outgoing) : Number of Twitter users, the submitted Twitter user replied to more than once the last 30 days
  
• Size of relevant net (incoming) : Number of Twitter users that replied to the submitted Twitter user more than once within the last 30 days
  
• Fans : Number of Twitter users that replied to guykawasaki within the last 30 days
  
• Stickiness : Number of people who replied at least twice / total number of replying users
  
• Twitter Rank : This is the position of the submitted Twitter user in the ranking of Twitterers receiving the most replies
  
• Ratio of outgoing to incoming contacts
  
• Overlap of outgoing and incoming net
  
• Tweets sent / day 50 Average
  
• Follow cost in milliscobles
  
• Replies sent / day
  
• Conversation Quotient (CQ) : Share of Tweets by the submitted Twitter user that were replies
  
• Conversational Rank
  
• Replies received / day
  
• Links posted by the submitted Twitter / day
  
• Link Quotient (LQ) : Share of Tweets by the submitted Twitter that included links
  
• Replies with Links by the submitted Twitter user's friends / day
  
• Link per friend

Six of these metrics are plotted on a graph, called TwitGraph. Below you can find printscreens of the results for two famous Twitter accounts : Barack Obama and Guy Kawasaki. Both graphs are quite differently. Guy Kawasaki engages actively in Twitter conversations. Barack Obama is the most followed user, but this Twitter user does not publish very often Twitter messages and this Twitter user does not reply to twitter messages of its followers.