Most Popular Link Sources Shared On Twitter [Infographic]

I have been on Twitter for over 4 years now I think. For me, it started out with a few tweets to a couple of friends for a few days. After that, I started looking at what other people were doing. That’s when I really started to grasp the enormity of what Twitter had to offer. Back in the day, sharing links on Twitter was truly respected. The fact that people were kind enough to take what they found interesting and inspiring and share it with other people was awesome. That was really what Twitter was all about when it first started picking up speed, and that is how it grew, for anyone who still remembers. Some of that is still there today, but what are the most popular link sources shared on Twitter? Have we ever looked into that?

Some people might think it is Mashable, TechCrunch or even Gizmodo. But no, in the top 10 most popular link sources we find a whole different set of websites actually. This might come as a huge surprise to you, but the world isn’t just all about technology, no matter how much we all want to read about it. It’s actually quite interesting when you think about it. One would imagine that Mashable with their almost 3 million strong following, and TechCrunch, not too far behind with their almost 2.5 million followers, would be prime candidates for the top spots.

In an infographic designed by Dan Mayer (and researched by Diffbot Page Classifier) called A Day In The Life Of Twitter, there is a different picture painted. This one crowns the Indonesian site detik.com as the winner when it comes to most popular links shared with 12,000 links per 1 million tweets sent in the world. That is a staggering number if I may say so myself. In second place we see BBC, which when you think about it, is quite as it should be.

Maybe the most interesting part of this study is that a massive 36% of all links shared on Twitter are actually images. Is Twitter rapidly becoming Pinterest? Are they trying to piggyback on the huge success that Pinterest is enjoying at the moment? These things would appear as if they were true. However, the fact is that the old Twitter never really had a way to share images in an efficient way before, which made the sharing of images a little wonky. Because of this, by any stretch of the imagination, it would certainly make a comparison between the old and new Twitter quite… dodgy to say the least.

One thing I didn’t know (and I am sure you didn’t know either) is that 7% (which is a huge number considering how many tweets are sent each day) of all links sent are actually page error links. They are 404s if you will. Yup, that is a colossal amount of links leading to nothingness. The fact that this comes in at number 8 on the most popular link sources shared list is a little bit worrying.

I found comfort in knowing that the second most popular link content is actually articles. They stand for 16% of the mass, and that is a pretty astounding number. By no means is the Twitter community intellectually challenged. All in all, I think Twitter is doing a hell of a job right now. If they could just fix the direct messages and the incredibly annoying load time for the Twitter website, I would use it a ton more.