Twitter Traffic Up After Injunction Rush

Traffic on social networking site Twitter spiked at 22% at the weekend, as ‘tweeters’ rushed to discover information about the footballer who had taken out an injunction against the site – according to research from the measurement company Experian Hitwise.

The 22% peak was 10% higher than the site’s previous busiest day in the UK on 9th May, when the media reported on the creation of a Twitter account which began naming those who had taken out superinjunctions.

Experian Hitwise takes its data from internet service provider, and its figures for visits to Twitter show a steady rise in traffic during March, with its share of internet visits in the UK growing by nearly 60%.

The figures suggest that millions of people have been visiting the site for the first time, possibly indicating a tipping point in the social networking popularity in the country.

Robin Boad, UK research director, said on the Hitwise corporate blog that: ‘12% of visits to the [Twitter] website are coming from new users. To put that into context, 99.5% of visits to Facebook in the UK come from returning visitors, but Twitter continues to attract new users to its website every single day’.

‘Facebook is clearly much bigger than Twitter (about 15 times bigger in terms of volume of visits) but Facebook’s growth in terms of new visitors (in the UK market at least) has been pretty static for some months now’.

Though Twitter only represents 0.55% of website visits in the UK – compared with 7.64% for Facebook, and 1% for BBC News – the growth means it has passed the BBC’s iPlayer in terms of popularity, and this weeks recent boom could see the site grow further.

The footballer, who has also taken out an injunction against the media revealing his identity linking to an affair with reality TV star Imogen Thomas, was revealed in a governmental session on privacy law to be Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs by Liberal Democrats MP John Hemming, his words protected under parliamentary privilege.