Hitwise: Twitter surpasses Digg's market share

Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?

That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.

Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg. 

According to Hitwise.com, the market share of the microblogging site Twitter has now caught up to that of the aggregator Digg.

(Credit: Hitwise.com)

According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.

A glance at a chart tracking the share of both services reveals that Twitter has been slowly, but steadily, gaining on Digg over the last few months, finally matching--and even passing--Digg last week. Hitwise said that as of the end of last week, Twitter was netting 0.021 percent of traffic in its Computers and Internets category, just a touch up from Digg's own 0.021 percent.

Perhaps a driver that allowed Twitter to overtake Digg was the tremendous interest last week in Twitter users' reports of the US Airways crash in the Hudson. One photograph of the plane, posted to TwitPic.com, a service that allows mobile Twitter users to append photos to their tweets, was viewed so many times that it took TwitPic's servers down for a while.

Hitwise noted that the general rise of social media has fueled Twitter's recent success, with many users of the site coming from services like Facebook, or MySpace, whereas Digg's traffic comes in large part--38.8 percent last week--from Google.

But in another report issued recently, Digg still far outweighs Twitter when it comes to total users, according to Compete, a site analytics service. Compete reported that Digg had 34.4 million users as of December, while Twitter lagged far behind at 4.4 million. 

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Social Networking:New Ways to Communicate

Social networking has created new ways to communicate, share information and build online communities of users who share similar interests. These networking sites give a platform to interact with people having similar interests. Millions of people are using these sites actively. It seems that social networking will soon be an enduring part of daily life.

These online communities offer plenty of opportunities to small and big businesses owners to reach the potential customers.An excellent website which has a fair traffic would definitely wish for more and more traffic to rise above its competitors. All you need is to create accounts for a variety of social media websites. Here are few tips you should keep in mind when getting started:

• Show your expertise and build trust.
  
• Find employees and business partners in the professional networking sites mentioned below.
  
• Try to find friends and join groups in the social bookmarking sites. Participate actively by commenting and voting on others favorites/bookmarks.
  

Here are few Professional-Networking Sites :

1. MySpace,
   
2. Facebook,
   
3. Ecademy
   
4. MEETin.org
   
5. LinkedIn.
   

Largest Social Bookmarking Sites

1. digg.com
   
2. Yahoo! Buzz
   
3. Technorati.com
   
4. del.icio.us
   
5. Propeller.com
   
6. StumbleUpon.com
   
7. reddit.com
   
8. mixx.com
   
9. BlueDot.us now known as faves.com