March Movers: Spring is in the air, so are Social, Sports, and Skittles
Written by Aaron Prebluda (contact - e-mail) -- April 9th, 2009 |
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Some big stories in March, and we’ll kick it off with the hottest one of all: Twitter. Sure, lots of buzz about the impact of Twitter as a game changer – everyone from NASA astronauts to NBA players to the hosts of “The View” are out there tweeting up a storm. The result: Unique Visitors to twitter.com were up 76.8% in March, with over 14 Million Americans trafficking to the site.
In other Social Media news, Facebook continues to ramp growth, increasing Unique Visitors 23.4% month over month. The page view data shows that Facebook is above and beyond the rest: over 91 Billion page views in March, over 50% more than second-ranked Yahoo.
Bring on the Madness
Sports sites sizzled in March, impacted by the NCAA tournament, MLB kick off, and Tiger’s return to the links. Bracketologists, fantasy baseball enthusiasts, and other aficionados surged to online sports properties. Leading the pack were cbssports.com (up 182% in Unique Visitors over February), ncaa.org (132% growth), and sportsnetwork.com (53%). The tourney and the slowdown of the NBA season appears to have affected nba.com traffic, down nearly 17% in unique visitors from February.
In addition to readying for the MLB season, baseball fans across the U.S. looked to mlb.com in March for World Baseball Classic scores, highlights, and stories. Unique visitors to the site surged by nearly 2 million, reaching an all-time March high of 7.5 Million visitors.
Skittles Success
Did Skittles’ bold move to redesign their site around Social Media pay off? According to their unique visitor increase in March, it would certainly appear that way. The skittles.com site was replaced with a live Twitter feed, with any tweet mentioning the word “Skittles” appearing on the page. Huge media buzzed around the strategy, and as a result, traffic to the site surged by an astonishing 2072%, attracting 441,855 people in March. Check out the daily reach graph below.
What changes will the month of April bring? Will Twitter continue it’s unbelievable growth trajectory? We’ll keep our fingers on the pulse of all things online and make sure to keep you informed.
Find out how a new month of traffic has impacted site traffic, Search, and the overall internet landscape in your industry with all of Compete PRO’s powerful tools.
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April 10th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I wonder if Twitter will be around long term or if it is just a bubble. Only time will tell.
April 11th, 2009 at 2:07 am
thank you
May 28th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Nice post,but I personnaly don’t like twitter