I fully believe this statement to be true, with one caveat, which I will offer at the end of the post.
The other day I was looking at the web analytics for my blog and noticed something interesting. I receive traffic to my blog from various sources, but I really just wanted to compare Twitter and Google (organic). Take a look at the graph below which represents Oct ’09 – Nov ’09:
While Google Search generated the most visits, visitors from Twitter and ow.ly (the URL shortener service I use), visited more pages and bounced out of the website far less. I would say that these visitors were more engaged and motivated than those from Google Search.
I wanted to take the trending back further and looked at the entire year and noticed that Twitter was less effective as a traffic source with high bounce rates and low engagement. I was sure there was something wrong so I did some further investigation. See the chart below which compares Oct ‘ 09 – Nov ’09 with Apr ’09 – May ’09:
The comparison shows that traffic from Twitter/ow.ly was more effective during October/November than April/May. This leads me to my caveat about why I think Twitter is the best traffic source.
Twitter Reputation
Over the past 6 months my followers have increased from under 200 to just over 500. I’m not saying its the number of followers that make a difference, that is just a side-effect of positive Twitter reputation. Here is one thing that I do that I think positively affects my Twitter reputation:
- retweet, retweet, retweet. I do promote my blog posts, but I am always aware of the value of Rt’ing someone else’s great idea. I am choosy in which tweets I will retweet, if I don’t think others will find value, I don’t retweet it.
So why is Twitter the best traffic source? It’s because people trust you.
What are your thoughts? Have you noticed quality traffic from Twitter? Please share your thoughts.
