Twitter Drives a Lot of Traffic to Media Sites, but Doesn't Bring a Lot of Customers to Online Retailers
According to the latest data from Hitwise about Twitter users in the UK, Twitter has become an important source of traffic for entertainment sites, other social networks, and news and media sites, but compared to other social networks, Twitter only sends a small amount of traffic to online retailers. Hitwise's Robin Goad also points out that Twitter is now the 30th biggest source of traffic in the UK and accounts for 1 out of every 350 visits to a typical web site in the UK.
According to this data, just over half of Twitter's traffic (55.9%) goes to "content-driven" sites like blogs, news, other social networks, and entertainment sites. In contrast only about 9.5% of all of Twitter's visitors go to "transactional web sites" in the travel, business, finance, and online retail categories. For Facebook, this number is 14.7% in the UK, and for Google searches it's over 30%.
At first glance, these numbers for Twitter look a bit low, but after looking at how people use Twitter, these numbers do make a lot of sense. According to another recent study from the Conference Board, the top reasons for people to tweet are "connect with friends (42%), update their status (29%) and look for news (26%)." The study also found that two out of three Twitter users use the service to interact with friends.
It is also interesting to note that another recent study from the NPD Group found that Twitter users are more likely to buy music than non-Twitter users. Chances are that this is also related to the demographic makeup of Twitters user base which tends to skew a bit older, but it also clearly shows why Twitter could be such a valuable source of traffic for retail sites.
In many ways, it is probably a good thing that brands are still trying to figure out how to best utilize Twitter. If brands want to make good use of Twitter - which, for many would mean driving traffic to their sites - they have to become part of the community. We would love for Twitter to find a viable business model so that the service can stay afloat even as it grows, but in the end, most of us use it as a personal communications medium and unless brands can find a way to become part of that in an authentic, non-creepy way, they won't be able to profit from Twitter's rapid growth - and maybe that's a good thing, too.
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This is great information for any marketing team to help them figure out where to invest their time -- now I (as a marketer) know what to expect and can make more accurate projections.
I do think, however, that even with a smaller percentage, the overall numbers are astounding, and any wise marketing team will take advantage of Twitters utility.
As a Twitter user I usually like more than a 140 character, buy-from-the-landing-page explanation before I buy. When it's free to post, you can get lead into a lot of bad situations if you're not careful. I have made purchases from blog recommendations...that I got to from Twitter.
One other interesting thought - are the Facebook leads from status updates/links, from fan/business pages, or from the paid advertisements? If only from the paid ads, then the percentages might tell a different story when compared to FB status leads.
I wonder if it because there is so much marketing SPAM on the Twitter. Or, that people don't even realize "it" happened.
Example - I need a laptop, I tweet the fact and get a recommendation and a suggestion that Best Buy has them on sale. I go and purchase.
Has Best Buy figured out the reason I'm there is because of Twitter - doubt it, but that is why.
How does one measure that?
And it never will. It's a fad, the flavor of the month. Nothing more, nothing less. Looking back over the last 10 years, it is very obvious that Social Networking products have failed as conversion generating vehicles. They are like toys for adults. The only difference being that it just takes a bit longer for an adult to get bored with the toy and move on. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either a spammer, scammer or both. Here's some sound advice; do not waste your marketing dollars/time on twitter, facebook, linkedin, myspace, hollow blogs or cheap local commercials. Use it wisely on vehicles and techniques that will have deep penetration and long lasting recall value.
While both customers and retailers are still figuring out the best ways to use Twitter for e-commerce, I do think Twitter allows retailers to interact with customers in interesting ways, even if they're not all direct sales. For example, it's a very fast, simple and cheap way to provide customer service. This kind of activity wouldn't be measured through downstream traffic stats, but could certainly influence a customer's purchasing decisions.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter as a channel for e-commerce develops. There are a number of very smart people trying to figure this out, and I am sure we're going to see numbers like the ones above increase. I don't think Twitter should be anyone's main marketing channel, but it still seems wise for it to be one of them.
I guess this is no more different than bookmarking sites which also brings to lots of traffic but it very seldomly converts to customers.