Twitter – King of Publishers

Awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss recently published an article 'Twitter drives 4 times as much traffic as you think' giving facts as to how publishers underestimate the volume of links shared / traffic driven by Twitter. Awe.sm's findings were as follows:

1. Just under 25% of links shared on Twitter produced a twitter.com referrer.
2. Nearly a third of links shared on Twitter contained no referrer information.
3. 13% of Twitter links listed another referrer.

As mentioned above, only 25% of the traffic generated from tweets comes with a twitter.com referrer. This makes calculating the true amount of traffic attributable to twitter very complex. There are a number of reasons why links shared on Twitter don't get the referrer credit they deserve. Many users simply use Twitter clients that don't pass referrer information which means that this traffic will never get attributed to Twitter.

And increasingly, links shared find their way onto other sites which display tweets and feeds – traffic generated from these tweet will also won’t have Twitter as its referrer. The reason for this is that a lot of 3rd party websites syndicate tweets on their own sites, to add real-time content to compliment their service. As the tweet is now on a 3rd party site, it means that when the user clicks on a link, their browser will pass the referrer details of the site which was displaying the tweet, not Twitter.com. This issue of being unable to truly track the impact of tweets suggests that Twitter has a huge amount of advertising potential for publishers - and it is just getting started in this area.

Since last year when Twitter first launched its advertising platform and its two ad formats – ‘Promoted Tweets’ and ‘Promoted Trends’ it has been slowly experimenting and releasing more and more features for marketers. Early this March it launched geographical segmentation which allows marketers to do more localised and targeted advertisements e.g. showing different ads to different Twitter users across the world. It is also working on a strategy allowing marketers to target Promoted Accounts–its pay-per-follower feature–by country.

This was followed by their recent launch of “Quickbar” (their much hated feature) – a bar installed across the top of their app which “shows trends and other important stuff”.

Lenore in her post has already talked about the emerging trends of “Promoted Tweets To Followers” in the Twitter story. This would allow brands to send messages directly to users who already follow them by inserting advertising at the top of their timelines. These tweets would appear in the followers’ actual timelines. In the past a Twitter user would only see personalised tweets it he/she search for a specific term but this is no longer the case.

If the Quickbar uproar was any indication I am sure lots of devoted Twitter user will have something to say about all these new ad features of Twitter. Twitter might be trying to please its users by saying that Quickbar is an ‘alert system’ that will deliver ads and other information to the user but that is just sugar coating the truth. Quickbar is an ad delivery mechanism first and foremost. Regardless of what the Twitter users say, the truth of the matter is if Twitter cannot convert its inventory into money stream, we will eventually be tweeting its demise.

Other Sources: Quickbar, Personalised tweets