Web Traffic Case Study - Twitter and Facebook

Now that Social Networking is all the craze, I decided to test Twitter and Facebook’s traffic generating power for getting webtraffic. Here’s what I found.

I was working on a site devoted to helping a print publication that’s been around literally since 1813 move its assets to the web using a content management system, though it had been on the web in html format that had grown a bit cumbersome.

I set up a Facebook group and a Twitter feed for the site. I invested some time building up a Twitter following and advising friends on Facebook about the group there. I kept them advised regarding the impending launch.

Because the CMS of the site was WordPress, I installed plugins that supposedly produced a Twitter message (tweet) whenever there as a new post. I’ve run into some problems with that so it’s not been as fool proof as intended, but though this site has been on the web for years in the previous incarnation (same domain name).

Though there were all those old links that “should” have been producing some traffic, the Twitter and Facebook traffic were “through the roof” compared to the previous links.

While my Twitter plug in was working, it was equal to Facebook for getting new visitors but it has lagged behind due to that bug I haven’t been able to fix for some reason!

But given that people are coming to a news/information site, the results are pretty good. According to Google Analytics, Facebook folks come and stay on site for about 5 minutes. Twitter visitors are staying less… but still over a minute. Both are, on avereage, checking out multiple pages.

And, of course, every time someone visits we are encouraging them to receive our direct updates by email.

This is in addition to other marketing. As old content is migrated to the site, that will help build organic search result traffic.

But for as little time as has been invested in Facebook and Twitter to generate these results, it’s shown me several things:

1. Social Networking can produce excellent - and to date - “free results”, it’s an excellent “Sweat Equity” tool.

2. Social Networking takes an investment of regular effort for real results - my results have been promising. They’d be better if efforts were made to create a HUGE Twitter following and HUGE Facebook group and work Twitter daily and Facebook weekly.

3. There needs to be more effort to translate the Social Network traffic to direct subscribers. That’s coming as the basic workings of the site are “nailed down” so to speak.

Over all - if you’re launching an “authority site” of any kind, Facebook and Twitter are awesome tools if use correctly to generate traffic if you have the know how, time, and can coordinate your efforts.

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