Do Retweets Actually Send You Any Traffic?

Twitter January 21, 2010 20 Comments

I was looking through our stats this evening here on the blog and one thing really jumped out at me, just how little traffic comes to the site via Twitter. Twitter is often championed as a great way to share links and build traffic to websites but to be honest we really don’t benefit from it all that much. Like many sites we have a share on Twitter button from Tweetmeme on the top of each post so as people can easily share our content with their followers if they find it useful. If you flick through most of our posts they have a good few tweets each with some getting in to the hundreds of tweets and indeed I wrote this post a while back about Just how Much Traffic 800 Retweets Sends You. I think a lot of people think that Twitter is going to send tons of traffic to their site but I wanted to use our own blog to show down below why that is just not the case. Here is our traffic for the last month and where it came from…

Traffic To This Site In Last Month

SZ traffic
Google Traffic Referrals

No Spikes

Now during the last months we have had some posts that are a lot bigger than others like this one about small businesses (90 Tweets) and this one about social media blogs (105 tweets) that have clearly resonated more than normal with readers and had 5 times as many Re tweets as a normal story yet there has been no associated rise in traffic on the day they were popular.

Traffic Spikes

Automatic Tweets

Any time we have been featured on big blogs like Techcrunch or Mashable what usually happens is that we pick up a couple more bots that just tweet our content out automatically. This may make it look like your numbers are higher than they are from Re tweets but the fact is they send little or no traffic and have no value whatsoever.

Why Keep The Retweet Button?

I was never really a big fan of the sharing buttons with all the social media profiles on them as I never used them myself but I do like the simplicity of the Re tweet button and how it works. I often use it on other sites myself to share content that I like and we get people from all over the world sharing our content with others because of the button. You are going to attract some random people who Re tweet your content which is not going to do you any good as we see above but you also have to remember that Google have started incorporating tweets in to their search results and you can be sure that the algorithm that determines search results is now starting to be weighted to include stories that get shared a lot through social sites like Twitter. The way they will weight it of course is by using the influence of people who Re tweet and with bots and spammers having little influence it all comes down to the amount of reliable authoritative people who pass your content on via social sites and the only way that will happen long term is by writing good quality, insightful and useful content.

Google Is Still The Big Daddy

This blog has only been running for 8 months and it has always been Google that sent the most traffic. We had some basic SEO done to the template at the very start and since then it has just been a case of writing 2 posts a day that people find useful and keep referring back to. It’s not a complicated formula but it does take a huge amount of time and one of the main reasons I had for writing this post was to show that getting traffic to your blog is not just a case of getting a blog post up there and hoping it is catchy enough post for a couple of hundred people to Re tweet it, that just won’t do anything much for you. I am sure that there are sites out there who get sent more traffic via Twitter but I think we have enough data here to prove that it is not as important as some people believe it to be and if you lift up the bonnet and look at the power of the Re tweet it might not be what it seems. Forget Twitter, Google is still where it is at.

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