Twitters Traffic Generation

Simon Cox — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:31:16 +0000

As with any new ‘channel’ talk soon turns to how to make money from it, and Twitter is no different. Hitwise’s research director, Robin Goad, blogs on some interesting Twitter numbers here:

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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Twitters Traffic Generation

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