Oprah's well publicized first tweet on Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter's overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook's ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March. ]]>
According to Hitwise, the search term "oprah twitter" was the 35th highest search term with the word Twitter in it last week, which doesn't sound like much, but it is important to note that Hitwise's search data is weekly and Oprah's show only aired on Friday.
Oprah's Midas Touch
Now that Twitter has received Oprah's Midas touch, the real question will be to see how many of these new users will stick around. While Oprah devoted a large segment of her show on Friday to Twitter, she did not really explain the service in any great detail.
We will have to see if the majority of new users will actually use the service as intended, or if they will just stick to following celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears (who also now has more than 1 million followers), or Aston Kutcher, whose race with CNN for reaching more than 1 million followers surely also helped to spark the sudden rush of new Twitter users (and we can't help but wonder whether the effort of a certain group of users to push a fake user account past Kutcher and CNN by creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts isn't also reflected in these stats).
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