Twitter sending traffic to online media but not retail.

A couple of stand out paragraphs:

“One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.”

“The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.”

It’s like any channel, make the experience engaging and genuinely worthwhile and you will see the rewards… And if you aren’t really sure why you’re using a channel like Twitter, then don’t expect your audience to work it out for you…

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Following any new update from the search engine giants, I am always keen to see if there will be any impact on my clients and their search strategies. Recent Google additions, for instance, tend to be pushing hardworking SEO rankings down under maps, products and videos!! After a few searches, I did come across two interesting things.

The One and Only Argos!

Upon searching for Argos, I found that Argos itself was the ONLY advertisement showing. Hopefully, this is just a teething error. When I searched for other big online stores I found the usual lengthy listings. Hopefully this is not part of some bigger plan, otherwise I can here the cries of despair from the Argos affiliates now.

Follow the Yellow Dot

The other addition I found to the listing is a little feature that allows you to see information about the page within the listing. Next to each natural search listing, if you hover over the advert, you see a yellow dot appear. Hover over this dot and it gives you a snippet of information. Is this any use and will people find it? Personally, I don’t see how this will help users choose which listing to click on. Initially it appeared and I could not see how it happened; it took me a few minutes to track down the link again. Case for more effective usability, I think.

To me, Bing just looks like the same old shoes, but with a bit of a polish; it’s certainly one thing I will be keeping an eye on to see what Microsoft has in mind. Personally, I want to see them go after Google and really try to be innovative, but I remember when Microsoft released adcenter and how bad the interface was initially. 2 years on, many of the same issues still exist.

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