Facebook and Twitter: Traffic falls in February

When it comes to website traffic figures – it is often hard to know how much we should trust them. This is just the case with the recent traffic estimates for Facebook and Twitter, it seems that Facebook did not pass Google for traffic as it had been suggested.

The Guardian has been looking into this in more detail and has learned from Hitwise that traffic for these social media sites were in fact down and not up as was suggested. Traffic for Twitter fell by 9.63 percent; Facebook fell by 4.32 percent, MySpace by 11.5 percent and LinkedIn by 8.30%.

However, we have to take into consideration that there were only 28 days in February, this works out to 9.7 fewer days. So if we work in those factors – Twitter remained the same while Facebook did actually grow. Twitter had 21.3m unique visitors for that month, which is still a very healthy figure.

There are those who would say that Twitter has had its day, but let us not forget that these figures do not include API-based connections or mobile clients. Once all these figures are taken into consideration, Twitter and Facebook traffic is still doing well – this is not the same story for MySpace though.

We know that this ailing social media website is undergoing a revamp, but we have to wonder if it could ever compete with its news competition?