To say the least there’s been a certain amount of hype around the micro-blogging platform Twitter over the past year, and two stats by Internet metrics firm Hitwise show that the hype has indeed been matched by the numbers.

Something that’s been fairly well reported is analyst Heather Dougherty’s post that Twitter has now passed the social tagging system Digg in the US in terms of reach.

Heather’s fellow analyst Robin Goad has now produced a chart that shows Twitter growing by a whopping 974% here in the UK (see chart) over the past year. Robin says that his numbers are if anything an underestimate as it doesn’t take into account the fact that more and more people now access Twitter via 3rd party applications like Tweetdeck.

Polish social network no 6 in the UK

At the same time it’s worth injecting a dose of reality into the statistics. No doubt, Twitter’s growth is extremely impressive and shows no signs of slowing down. And it’s something brands should be increasingly paying attention to, especially as Hitwise’s figures show that Twitter brings a lot of traffic to websites (news sites in particular).

Yet in the UK it’s currently still only no.23 in social networks, with Facebook remaining the run-away leader, accounting for just under 5% of all web traffic at Christmas.

As I’ve posted before, comparing Facebook to Twitter is like comparing apples and oranges.

They are only similar in a broad sense, yet their appeal, uses and target audiences are different – Twitter will always be relatively niche when compared to Facebook, which is rapidly becoming the Google of social networks (or perhaps a better comparison, like hotmail was to webmail 7-8 years ago).

Interestingly enough, the sixth most popular network in Britain is a Polish site: Nasza-Klasa, taking into account the fact that over the past five years around half a million Poles have come to work in the UK.