A VC - Latest Comments in The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:17:15 -0000

When you see something on twitter you like, you rebroadcast it to your followers. Copy the tweet and send a message that says RT @whomever "............."

That's a retweet

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

rerollarcoaster — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:06:11 -0000

Can you explain what "retweeting" is? Just getting my feet wet with all this and am still learning. Thanks.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

RacerRick — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:49:41 -0000

It might be a tad Guy Kawaski, but... twitter has replaced my feed reader so I like it when people add their rss feed into their twitter feed.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:40:47 -0000

It feels like spamming twitter

I do it manually when it feels right

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

RacerRick — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:32:17 -0000

Arrington links TC articles in his twitter. I'm sure a lot of his traffic comes that way.

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).

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:49:17 -0000

But google, hacker news, and techmeme have been my top traffic sources for years

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

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

headlemur — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:46:52 -0000

You are not the center of the universe :) Seriously, you are measuring the head and the tail of the same thing. It's like evil twins, ya can't have one without the other. As you yourself stated above. Re tweeting is just cross posting in a thong. Good for you as an investor though :)

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.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:43:14 -0000

Then why wouldn't I see similar growth from refers from google, techmeme, hacker news, etc?

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

headlemur — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:32:18 -0000

Bzzzt! Sorry Fred, you are wrong on this one.
Unemployment and Recession are the drivers here.
Surfing the net is the cheapest entertainment around.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Wendy Gerraty — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:21:36 -0000

Really small numbers Fred.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:36:18 -0000

I'll try harder next time

Not every post is a winner

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:33:12 -0000

This is part of what twitter plans to address with their services aimed at corporations and businesses who are operating on twitter

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:31:11 -0000

Links are currency/money for sure

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

humorplus — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 04:06:53 -0000

Wow.. great!
The traffic to this blog from twitter has tripled, I agree too.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Anthony Castelli — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:30:44 -0000

you are gettiny way full of yourself tell me something we all don't know

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

dfriedman — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:49:26 -0000

Presumably all of this is true.

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.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Jonathan Strauss — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:17:35 -0000

The post by Joost that brandingme references is a great summary of the specific issue with Twitter referrers. But I think it also represents a broader emerging issue of effectively tracking and understanding traffic driven by social media in general. When I look at my bit.ly referrers for a link I *only* sent to Twitter, at least 50% of the clicks have no referrer (and I've heard of people seeing that as high as 80% for some links). That means in your Google Analytics, all those clicks are counted towards Organic traffic by default and could meaningfully change the numbers you state above.

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.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Joe Lazarus — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:15:37 -0000

I see. So, I need not just more friends, but better friends... ones that
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.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:05:36 -0000

That's great to hear. Email audience to b2b content converts to custimers over time

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:02:58 -0000

Yup

Third party clients show up as direct

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:02:54 -0000

Its not just that I have a lot of followers (I do) but a lot of retweeting is the biggest factor

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

fredwilson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:02:45 -0000

I am sure myspace works great if you have the right service for that audience

Social nets are media like anything else each has its own audience

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

joshmchugh — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:53:31 -0000

In the entertainment biz, Twitter is proving to be a hugely effective generator of traffic. Better yet, it's highly time-specific. For the launch of the second season of one of my company's web series, Dorm Life, we had widely announced a March 2 date, but subsequently struck a deal with MySpace giving them a 48-hour exclusive head start on posting Dorm Life episodes.

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

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Annalise — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:34:49 -0000

Social networks are taking over, even for search engines. They aren't in the lead yet but it is bound to happen because of networks like Twitter and Facebook. HopOnThis.com is a social network similar to the above mentioned but it gives members rewards for using the site.

Re: The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

Shane — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:56:33 -0000

Interesting...we actually see most of our referrals from MySpace. We have found that MySpace works better because it is far more open than the others. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this?