Thursday
Oct292009
On The Twitter SUL? It's Useless, Sources State
Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 10:15AM
I have had a few chats with various people and companies that are on the Twitter SUL and I have reached a conclusion.
It is useless in driving traffic.
Many of the companies I have talked to have stated that even though their follower numbers are growing rapidly, hits to their various properties are still relatively the same or even dropping.
As for the people I have talked to who on the Twitter SUL who regularly share items? They are reporting the same trend via stats they have gathered via their respected shorteners.
To me, this makes complete sense. Many people that are joining Twitter are most likely not techie sorts of people and arguably many of the people featured on the SUL are more or so on the techie side. They are simply subscribing to some people to see what Twitter is all about, so why would they click through on links they didn't care about before anyways?
Of course, you could argue that TechCrunch and Mashable are doing great because of the SUL, disproving my argument. This actually makes absolutely perfect sense too. Both of them write about Twitter apps, Twitter tips and Twitter in general. So of course people joining Twitter and are curious as to what it is are going to click-thru on these posts. But we can see the difference in referral traffic between Mashable and Techcrunch via compete data.
TechCrunch, while they write about Twitter a lot, still focus on start-ups and VC's as well as other various items. So while Twitter makes up 4% of their over all traffic, double that and you have Mashable. This is because Mashable writes about Twitter all the time, hell, they are the self-declared social media journal of the web, so Mashable is hitting the perfect audience for them with Twitter.
While none of this has come as a shock to me, many of the people I talked to on the SUL were quite shocked that they weren't seeing more impressive numbers. I suppose this is understandable, simply because many people talk about Twitter like it is the messiah of blog traffic, when in all actuality, it isn't.
Guess Twitter is all talk and no show, but whos fault is that?
It is useless in driving traffic.
Many of the companies I have talked to have stated that even though their follower numbers are growing rapidly, hits to their various properties are still relatively the same or even dropping.
As for the people I have talked to who on the Twitter SUL who regularly share items? They are reporting the same trend via stats they have gathered via their respected shorteners.
To me, this makes complete sense. Many people that are joining Twitter are most likely not techie sorts of people and arguably many of the people featured on the SUL are more or so on the techie side. They are simply subscribing to some people to see what Twitter is all about, so why would they click through on links they didn't care about before anyways?
Of course, you could argue that TechCrunch and Mashable are doing great because of the SUL, disproving my argument. This actually makes absolutely perfect sense too. Both of them write about Twitter apps, Twitter tips and Twitter in general. So of course people joining Twitter and are curious as to what it is are going to click-thru on these posts. But we can see the difference in referral traffic between Mashable and Techcrunch via compete data.
TechCrunch, while they write about Twitter a lot, still focus on start-ups and VC's as well as other various items. So while Twitter makes up 4% of their over all traffic, double that and you have Mashable. This is because Mashable writes about Twitter all the time, hell, they are the self-declared social media journal of the web, so Mashable is hitting the perfect audience for them with Twitter.
While none of this has come as a shock to me, many of the people I talked to on the SUL were quite shocked that they weren't seeing more impressive numbers. I suppose this is understandable, simply because many people talk about Twitter like it is the messiah of blog traffic, when in all actuality, it isn't.
Guess Twitter is all talk and no show, but whos fault is that?
Reader Comments (3)
if you talk about twitter you are likely to get a bit of attention because naturally everyone on twitter is interested in twitter, i've come to the conclusion that the quality of your relationships with your followers is more important than quantity so right now my goal is to reduce the number of people that i'm following but give those people more of my time and attention, the other thing i'm working on is to provide enough value in other areas so that people will want to follow and interact with me, "everyone is broadcasting, no-one is listening"
You have hit it right on the head dj
and also, with targeted advertising it's possible to put out multiple versions of an article and split test and tweak it until you get the best response possible and you can do that relatively quickly but with social bookmarking it takes longer and you really only get one shot at it - people are not going to be very impressed with you if you publish 12 articles that are all the same with some slight variations