You’ve no doubt heard about this site called Twitter over the last few months, it could be that the media is more tuned into social networking sites, but it’s most probably because Tweeting and Twitter traffic are growing amazingly fast.

Here are the 365 day visitor counts to Twitter  —

Visitors to Twitter.com have roughly increased by a factor of 4 over the last year with stead, progressive growth being the most interesting part. What is especially interesting is the growth in the last half of this year – nearly doubling the number of visitors from 2M to just under 4 Million.

Putting Twitter into perspective, it still has quite a ways to go to catch up with some of the more established social networking sites – for example, here is a comparison of Twitter traffic to Facebook and Myspace – the two grand-daddies of social networking:

As you can see, Twitter is sitting just under 4M visitors while Facebook is also growing in the last half of this year to achieve an amazing 600M visitors – so there’s certainly more room for growth and it’s not quite clear if Twitter holds the same degree of interest for college students as do music, video and file sharing sites like Facebook and Myspace do. 

What is also quite interesting is to see the drop off in Myspace traffic, it seems your social networking site is only as good as their last quarter’s ability to generate new and interesting trends/applications/ and other ways to attract traffic.  Clearly the focus on opening up Facebook to third party applications has paid off in terms of traffic.

Twitter has become one of our favorite sites for…

  • Connecting with new partners, affiliates and those with authority in our different niche markets
  • Communicating with our customers on a very different level than email or blogging allows
  • Sending out notifications or important announcements
  • Market research, niche market discovery, market trend analysis and even in-depth concept and idea testing

There are so many uses of Twitter that may not be visible to the newbie user trying to decide what to make of this new phenomenon.

If you haven’t joined the Twitter community yet, then take 20-seconds and signup for your free account, then go ahead and follow us at our Twitter account (we’ll follow you in turn) and let your networking begin.Â