Over the last 12 months Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK. There isn’t many days that pass where you don’t see or hear it mentioned in personal company or in the media. 2009 has been an amazing year for the micro-blogging site; 93% of its growth has occurred during 2009 and we are only in month 8!

Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. According to Hitwise, during May 2009, Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. Only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, whereas Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), provide 14.7%.

TechCrunch reported recently that there are 1 million users of Twitter posting a total of 3 million messages a day! This surely provides enough reason to set up a profile for your brand.
Twitter is about engaging with your followers; your profile must be personable and you must be willing to interact. You could do this by setting up a Twitter group relevant to your companies niche/sector and starting a conversation this way. Experts involved with your business could offer up snippets of advice via tweets and include a link to more detail as tweets are limited to 140 characters. Don’t be afraid to follow others relevant to your sector or brand.

When Twitter settle on a business model to monetise the site they are sure to make pretty penny with not too much effort on their part. Now the brand is globally established and they have a good group of well known faces acting as unintentional ambassadors for their micro blogging brand e.g Stephen Fry, Demi Moore etc, Twitter’s loyal user base should be keen to interact and purchase from brands that have embraced Twitter. So now is the time to set up an account for your brand to engage with the community and get tweeting!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.