In Exploring Social Media: Twitter Adoption Stats and Demographics, I covered the article by Hitwise, “Twitter traffic according to Hitwise,” which cited statistic research showing Twitter moving into main stream adoption. The report also offered some other interesting downstream traffic stats, the numbers which report on what types of links Twitter users click, an indication of the trends and interests of Twitter users.

If asked what types of links would be most likely clicked through from Twitter tweets, you might agree with my blogger friends whom I asked the same question. They all responded with blogs. After all, bloggers were some of the earliest adopters of Twitter.

However, according to Hitwise, blog clickthroughs represent only 6.6% of all the downstream traffic, not the largest majority. Entertainment websites account for 17.6% and news and media for 10%.

They list 14.6% going to social networks as the second highest statistic for clickthroughs from Twitter.

Many consider Twitter a social network, as they do MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, so maybe the social network sites link to those types of services or to specific tweets. The problem with this type of information is the lack of a clear definition of what entertainment, social networking, and blogs mean. Blogs are social networks, and many of the most popular entertainment sites in the world are hosted on blog platforms – aren’t they blogs? If users are retweeting and linking to twitter tweets, then that would also account for the high number of social networking link traffic. [Read more…]