What Does 800 Retweets Do For Your Traffic?

We ran a twitter lists project last week which some people liked and some didn’t. The results are all available and the lists have been populated for people to use as they please. Last week we showed just how much traffic getting featured on Techcrunch would send your website and today we thought we would take one of the articles (The English Twitter Lists) and show you the info generated thanks to Tweetmeme analytics to give  you a glimpse of the power of re tweeting. The numbers again are surprisingly lower than one would expect but the interesting element is that there is enough data to not only show what 800 Re tweets gets you but also to show what services and apps people are on while using twitter and also the short lifespan of a story on Twitter…

Total Clicks

As you can see the 800 odd tweets generated over 6000 Tweets which is not a huge amount given several people with over 20,000 followers re tweeted the link but you do have to take into account that a lot of people will have seen the link on a number of occasions so won’t have clicked through to it once they had seen it once already.

Tweet Sources

I would have thought a lot more people would have been using apps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic but it appears that the Web is by far and away the number one source for our Re tweets. Seesmic shows up poorly with Tweetdeck nearly 4 times as big and all the other apps and clients having small shares of the market way behind.

Tweets Per day

Once a story breaks on twitter it has a very short life span and to be honest ours probably dragged on even longer than others would have. You can see the peaks during the UK working day and the story nearly dies a death on the 3rd day.

URL shortener

Not much of a surprise here as Bit.ly is the default shortener for Twitter and you can see from the numbers here what a huge portion of the market they have and how much data they are controlling (watch out for them in the future).

Referring Domains

As you would expect here most of the traffic is coming from either Twitter or our own site here as people spot the story and re-tweet it directly.

Summary

Again here the numbers do flatter to deceive slightly. I spoke to some people in the know about how much traffic they would have expected from 800 Re tweets and all the answers were over 50,000 visits so it just shows that even people who use this medium every single day have no idea of the power. This would of course be very transient traffic with people only interested in getting listed but it does show that although the power of the re tweet is huge it is not as big as some might have thought. One number that is not listed here though is the amount of streams the link appeared in, 650,000, that is an impressive number. The takeaway here as always would be create great content and people will find, discover and share it anyway