Peak of Australian Twitter use was at Future of Media Summit 2008

Hitwise has just released statistics on Twitter usage in Australia, showing that Twitter usage is up over 500% over the last year. More interestingly, Australia’s share of Twittering globally has more than tripled in that time. It should also be noted that people increasingly use mobiles and Twitter clients such as Twhirl, so Hitwise would not be seeing this traffic, suggesting that the increase in usage is probably significantly greater than the figures they’re reporting.

Of particular interest is that Twitter’s peak of usage in Australia was at the time of the Future of Media Summit 2008, on July 15. This isn’t that surprising given the very strong use of Twitter at and beyond the Summit (see Twitter posts tagged #fom08), and the many people who commenced Twittering at the event.

Certainly other more recent events in Australia (for example today’s Web Directions South #wds08) are likely to have more Twitter usage than the Future of Media Summit, however that is on the back of a significant increase in the local Twitter population since then. It’s certainly great to see that the Future of Media Summit got such great Twitter uptake, especially since the event covered the entire media landscape, not just social media, and many attendees were from traditional media and unlikely to ever Twitter.

Thanks for the reference from the blog of social media strategist and Twitterer extraordinaire Laurel Papworth!

Also see the original release from Hitwise for more interesting insights, such as the fact that Twitter delivers 10x more traffic to financial institution websites than it did a year ago, suggesting that Twitterers are saying either nice or bad things about banks.