Hitwise: Twitter Taking Off In The UK

Twitter may be associated with itty bitty messages and terrible reliability, but somehow, it’s managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean. New data shows that Twitter is actually quite popular in the UK.

"Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America," writes Hitwise’s Robin Goad.

Twitter’s Impressive Rise (Photo Credit: Hitwise)

It doesn’t look like Twitter’s overseas success is anywhere near peaking, either, as he continues, "UK Internet visits to www.twitter.com have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year."

The odd thing about Goad’s discoveries is that Twitter hasn’t done much to court a British audience; the site twitter.co.uk even redirects to some place hawking "Accessible Computer Software" instead of the micro-blogging service.

Still, Twitter’s success in the UK is all the more impressive since little to no effort seems to have gone into it. And should the company ever decide to concentrate on expanding, fans and investors should be happy to hear that quadruple-digit growth is entirely within reach.

There are 7 Comments. Add Yours.

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Business networking
July 16, 2008 at 6:00 pm

They have some huge challenges ahead of them. Right now they are reaching probably less than 1% of their potential users. They can grow 100 times larger when it goes mainstream. How will they handle that?

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Stan Barker
July 17, 2008 at 10:59 am

I only found out about Twitter at the beginning of this year as the BBC use it for promoting their live events.

Perhaps this viral/corporate method of publicity has something to do with the take-up?

Stan Barker
Arena Flowers

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Alan Belth
July 17, 2008 at 5:52 pm

This is very interesting. Another case is where orkut a google company is more popular in Brazil than the USA.

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Marialle Evidente
July 17, 2008 at 10:06 pm

I have not tried Twitter yet, although I’ve been invited to join by several friends. Twitter just looks like another messaging service.

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John Nettleton
July 18, 2008 at 2:19 am

Hi Doug, what you report about Twitter’s UK growth is really interesting! Is there any info about the average age group that are Twiiter users in the UK and also world wide for that matter?

Regards

John

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Beth
May 20, 2009 at 5:44 am

Really like twitter. It’s growing day by day in UK

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Adeel
August 24, 2009 at 12:26 pm

I think it is an amazing service. I actually have stopped blogging because of twitter on.