Traffic to the micro-blogging site Twitter has increased ten-fold.

Research has revealed traffic to the micro-blogging site Twitter has increased ten-fold (947%) from January 2008 to mid-January 2009, making it one of the fastest-growing websites of the year according to Hitwise UK.

The site, www.twitter.com, has risen from being the 2,953rd most-visited website to becoming the 291st most-visited, and is the 23rd most popular social networking site in the UK.

Robin Goad, Hitwise’s Research Director, said: “If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. 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.

“Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.”

The most-followed celebrity on the site is currently Barack Obama, who has over 144,000 followers. UK celebrities are also popular – Stephen Fry has more than 50,000 followers, John Cleese has 30,000, while Jonathan Ross even used the site to communicate to fans during his suspension from the BBC.

The BBC has also fared well from Twitter’s success as around 10% of Twitter’s traffic goes to news and media websites. BBC News currently ranks as the 7th most popular site visited after Twitter.

However, Facebook remains the most popular social networking site overall with a 37% market share – on Christmas day 2008 the site received 1 in every 22 UK internet visits – far out-performing You Tube, the next most popular site with a 17% market share.

Hitwise UK provides the industry with statistics and information regarding websites and UK internet usage.

Susanna Woods