If you’ve been thinking about promoting a retail site on Twitter, well, stop.  New stats show that (in most cases, at least) not much traffic flows from Twitter to sites of that type.  And unfortunately, personal blogs don’t fare a whole lot better.

Heather Hopkins, a senior online analyst at Hitwise, put together some interesting information about where Twitter’s ever-growing audience tends to go after it’s gotten its fill of 140-character messages.  The top five places are Google, Facebook, TwitPic, MySpace, and Twitter Search.

As for broad categories, Twitter users’ favorite destinations are “Computers and Internet,” then “Social Networks,” “Entertainment,” “Lifestyle,” and “News & Media.”

The idea of using Twitter to make sales seems wrongheaded, then.  But Twitter is quite popular, and since people often switch from it to social networks, it may still come in handy if you’re trying to forge professional relationships.

You might be able to offload at least a few random items thanks to the service, too, since eBay is number 16 on the list of sites commonly visited after Twitter.

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