01 210 8127 or 086 868 45 06
+44 (0) 20 8133 8127
Do Retweets Actually Send You Any Traffic?
Like it? Tell your friends!
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
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.
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.
Possibly Related Posts:
- New Suggested Friends Tool On Twitter Incredibly Useful
- Video – Twitter in super real time
- Would you pay for Twitter stats?
- Why Twitter Will Either Build A Web Client Or Buy Tweetdeck
- What can Stephen Fry do for your traffic?
Google gets me 40-60% of my traffic every day. Twitter wouldn’t even be 5% most days, in fact I’d be lucky to get 2% of my traffic via twitter. I use twitterfeed to automatically update my feed with announcements of new blog content, but even though there’s a link to all content, it still gets little or no visits via twitter.
That doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying though. Twitter might not be a way to get traffic, but it can bring in new readers, who’ll sign up for your RSS feed and then come back to your site/blog again and again. It’s a quality of reader twitter can bring rather than a large quantity. Returning readers are the ones you want. They’re the lifeblood of any website.
Yeah it is good point about the RSS readers etc. If we have new readers around they will invariably sub via RSS, become a Facebook fan or watch our videos on YouTube and once they do one of those things they tend to stay around for good and keep coming back
It will be interesting to see how twitter traffic evolves. Maybe it could up it’s share against google as niche searchers start looking for social media type things via twitter search as twitter grows. I guess the bookmark list is always king.Reminds me of a post by Fred Wilson, http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/does-this-blog-get-more-traffic-from-google-or-twitter.html
Cheers for sharing that link
Twitter will always be for real time search I guess which is not the first place I would go for most things although I do find it useful a couple of times a day!
It’s not about forgetting Twitter. It’s about fishing where the fish are. Twitter could be where your audience is. Google could be where most of your audience is. Find your balance. In your case, it appears to be Google.
All the best.
I would never forget about twitter because I mostly use it for other stuff rather than driving traffic (although do share links from this blog). It is about fishing where there are plenty of fish like you say
For me:
~10% Search Engine
~70% Facebook
Wow that is a massive amount from Facebook! Never seen it that high before!
You might want to read any of the many articles showing that much of direct traffic is often actually Twitter traffic.
Traffic is one thing (and slightly meh, to be honest) – I think the better question is – how many people come to your website and take something away from it, and add to that RT with a comment because they’ve read it.
If you’re not having success with twitter, I’d seriously look at your content and ask why. Are your followers not enjoying your content?
I send out a lot of links and content through twitter and there’s always a considerable jump in traffic, eyeballs and interactions, and then subsequent RTs with additions.
It’s all very well having 45,000 people in your shop, but if no one buys anything, they’re just wearing out your carpet.
Very good points Darragh especially if your shop doesn’t have anything on sale! By nothing on sale I mean no adverts, affiliate links, products etc. Just need to decide what you want to get from your site I guess on an individual basis. At the moment we are happy with what we get from ours.
Not saying that don’t get value from twitter as the interactions, RSS readers, Faceboko fans, newsletters etc etc always go up when we get the posts with a 10o RTs but just wanted to show people who thought RTs would bring them all the traffic that is not the case and that mostly Google still reigns supreme! Like Boards would be same I am sure, lots of little spikes if people RT something of interest but without Google there would be problems (although saying that Boards not good example as lots of people coming back for info over and over). Anyway you know what i mean. Rambling
[...] aggregating content in real time and I can see any interesting stories breaking all over the world. It does have flaws around the Re tweeting of stories but it is becoming a more important site on the social media [...]
[...] is such a powerful tool is the speed at which information spreads across networks and the sheer power of the Retweet, great content usually spreads like wildfire around Twitter. Facebook on the other hand has always [...]
This link has nice info on sorting some of your trackings issues with Twitter http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/
Here’s a blog post he wrote about it: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/15/how-twitter-and-facebook-now-compete-with-google/
What do you guys think? Are there specific types of websites that are getting a significant portion of their traffic from social media? Don’t count social games and stuff. I used to work at a startup and almost half of our traffic came from Facebook and Twitter. It’s a very promising way to do marketing if you do it right. Darragh you’re right, the quality of your followers is very important. Followers who are interested in your content who will take action to actively participate, purchase, and share your content is going to be key for a business to find success here. Being able to optimize your social media properties so that you get the most followers and the most high-quality followers presents a huge opportunity. We’re working on social media optimization tools here at http://converse.ly/ – so come check us out.
- Ricky