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Clearly there is value in the social linking, but I think Arrington's post demonstrates very well that it's probably not worth investing much effort on Twitter *if* your primary goal is traffic generation. it's very easy to send links to Twitter without investing very much time, but based on Arrington's post, even as one of the biggest accounts on Twitter, Techcrunch is probably only getting around 2% of its traffic from it.
Fortunately, I think most publishers (including TechCrunch) are in the space of prioritizing content creation over investing lots of energy trying to drive traffic from social networks. Ultimately, it seems that focus still results in increasing traffic from social networks.
media and what do not
Twitter posts are much more 'over the transom'--there's a river of them flowing by at any point in time. On twitter it has much more to do with the quality of the link, less the referrer.
Nevertheless, I'd agree that both (and social media in general) are going to be big (and low cost) drivers of traffic going forward.
one of the interesting things I have noticed is how boxee is encouraging their users to submit what they are doing to twitter to drive traffic back to the originating source. I would love to know how much traffic Boxee is delivering for their site using this feature. It looks like they are inserting messages into twitter whenever someone views or "likes" a show at a pace of one insert every 1 or 2 minutes.
For example:
watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Tue, Mar 10, 2009 (s14 | e34) on Boxee. check it out at http://tinyurl.com/bzzcf8
or
watching Family Guy: Family Gay (s7 | e8) on Boxee. check it out at http://tinyurl.com/ajx939 (expand)
--Brief Plug--
My company, SocialFeet (still in beta), is doing this for multiple sites. We identify 'social actions', such as comments, posts, views, rating, etc. and make it possible for sites to empower their users to share their social actions with their friends on Facebook. [twitter coming soon] We see significant value for sites to leverage their users in spreading the word about the interesting activities they are doing throughout the web.
You touch on a feature of Twitter that I don't hear a lot of people talk about, and that is the concept of message amplification. Between the instant messenger like response times and the Marshall stack like amplification that you get via retweets, the ability to drive traffic via Twitter is unprecedented. In our Twitter based recruiting app, we see employers get 5X amplification on retweets alone, that's a pretty loud megaphone.
http://www.centernetworks.com/twitter-customer-...
Thanks
My site is almost too small a sample, but a little less than 1.5% of my visits are from Twitter. I don't link to myself that often, though, aside from my Twitter bio, which points to my blog. Twitter traffic converts about 20% lower than the site average based on page views / visit and time spent. The Twitter visitors are also much more likely to be repeat visitors than people entering my site from a source like Google. I don't have any data on Facebook since I never link to my blog from there.
Almost half of my traffic is direct
Ten percent is feed reader driven
Google search is about 20%
Hacker news and techmeme is about 10% combined
The rest is social media driven (twitter, facebook, and blogs)
Your percentages speak to the huge popularity of you as a brand. Most companies with some momentum and a customer base would have Google be the largest percent and direct in the 15-20%.
Congrats to you on this. Its a complement
retweet me. Or more likely, I just need to be more interesting.
Thanks for sharing the stats. I hope more people follow your lead so we can
see if the trends you're seeing are consistent across other sites &
verticals.
That's a retweet
Fred, you should add your RSS feed to your twitter. I would definitely visit AVC more often that way. (I doubt it would increase overall traffic however).
I do it manually when it feels right
Alan W. Silberberg
CEO, You2Gov, LLC
@you2gov - Twitter
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2...
I've always thought that traffic was customer acqusition and email was customer retention
drives site traffic and subsequent acquisition. Most subscribers are not
customers. Some opt-in subscribers are emailed, become visitors, then become
customers. Some subscribers are past customers and see how we've matured and
decide to come back as customers again (explaining why traffic and new
password requests skyrocket after email campaigns). Also, emails that
include very valuable information tend to get forwarded on; they have a
higher propensity of generating new subscribers, which then provides new
opportunity to communicate and drive traffic again.
That's because a lot of the clicks come from third party twitter clients
Facebook is a bit better in that all the traffic will have a Facebook URL as a referrer. But this is a far cry from the level of actionable information most publishers have come to expect using referrers and backlinks. For example if someone were to link to a post of mine on their blog, I would see in my Google Analytics (or even my WordPress stats) all the traffic coming from that link and I could easily follow it back myself. By investigating the context of the link, I can better understand the nature of that traffic driver and potentially take action by commenting on the post or contacting the author. However if someone I don't know drives a ton of traffic to my blog by sharing one of my posts on Facebook, I have no way to understand that traffic driver (beyond the fact that it's coming from Facebook) let alone take action on it.
I believe the combination of social media services as an increasingly important traffic driver and the predominance of dynamic and distributed (via APIs) UIs for those services has effectively broken the utility of conventional referrers/backlinks for traffic measurement. What I think is needed to fix it is essentially Feedburner for links.
Indeed, they are Fred. Drawing off that point, it's also important to consider the critical role search plays in tapping social media sites as a distribution valve. While services like Facebook & Twitter are increasingly becoming content navigation hubs, the social nature of sharing plays extraordinarily well into the Google universe, since they’re facilitating the creation of more quality links that are being counted. This, compounded with the fact that these platforms are cranking out structured, fresh content (read: accessible for sites like Google to crawl and expose) make them a search optimizer’s dream.
Obviously, Facebook is closed for many people, however, for some – especially businesses and groups - it’s not. Same goes for Twitter, blogs and the growing popularity of other sites that enable content creation and sharing. Google is still the largest source of eyeballs (by far) for people looking for information, however, an increasing trend is that search results are invariably being dominated by social media sites across all categories. That means more clickstreams are starting to appear as: Google > social media site > destination.
Remember though, Google is one of the great ironies in business history… the built their service on the backs of content created by 3rd parties everywhere, but have been notorious for not allowing themselves to be intermediated. It will be interesting to see how they react as social media sites continue to grow in terms of eyeballs and influence.
Third party clients show up as direct
Social nets are media like anything else each has its own audience
On March 1, a day into the MySpace exclusive period, we noticed that traffic was barely trickling into the MySpace channel. So we sent out a tweet on the @dormlife channel, containing a link to the first episode of the season on MySpace.
We used Bit.ly to compress the link. The compression is nice, but the real value is in Bit.ly's tracking and analytics capabilities. An hour later, we could see that 20% of those who had received the tweet had clicked through to the video. 48 hours later, 90% had clicked through. 3 days after the tweet went out, clickthroughs on the link had all but died out, but the final result was that 94% of the Dorm Life fans who got the tweet clicked through.
Since we began interacting with our audience via Twitter, we've found that the show's Twitter community has generated a ratio of views per community member (2:1) that is double the ratio (1:1) the show's Facebook-based community has generated. No doubt there's a lot of overlap between the two, but the point is that for us, Twitter messages are twice as effective in getting fans to check out episodes.
TV Week's Daisy Whitney mentioned it in a piece yesterday: http://bit.ly/TVwDL
Facebook needs to do a better job of explaining what it has changed, how everything works, and how these changes will benefit its users than it has done to date. Color me confused.
Not every post is a winner
The traffic to this blog from twitter has tripled, I agree too.
Unemployment and Recession are the drivers here.
Surfing the net is the cheapest entertainment around.
I am saying that surfing across the web is up. Somebody can probably make a case for an inverse correlation between the drop in miles driven and rise of time on web, consumer spending drop and rise in time on web, and so on. An example of this would be Amazon's sales numbers vs brick and mortar stores this past holiday season.
google, techmeme, hacker news, are not your most likely referral engines as they cover entirely too much territory and the chances of a 'slashdot' effect is less likely. slashdot can crash a site, the other guys not so much.
As far as traffic and exponential growth is concerned, I have to take those numbers with a large bowl of salt. 175 Million Active members? Or 175 Million username passwords issued? AOL played that game for years. See where they are now.
And I know I'm not the center of the universe
As I stated in the start of this post, I got this insight from looking at the refer logs of the companies we invest in
I only posted my traffic stats because its the only data I feel comfortable sharing