Twitter’s Popularity Skyrockets… But What About Your Site?
By Anna Johnson on March 17th, 2009In the United States alone, the popularity of Twitter has skyrocketed, with visitors almost doubling from 2.6 million in January 2009 to 4 million in February 2009, based on comScore data.
Globally, this growth pattern is likely to be similar. In January 2009, Twitter had 6 million visitors worldwide and we eagerly await comScore’s estimate for February.
All these figures are based on visitors to the Twitter website and do not include Twitter usage from desktop or mobile clients. The number of such clients has also risen. According to Twitdom there are now 529 Twitter applications.
Twitter’s growth is truly impressive, and Internet marketers continue seeking ways to capitalize on the service.
For many marketers, capitalizing on Twitter largely translates into recruiting thousands of followers.
But is there a point after which the extra followers don’t deliver much additional benefit? That’s only logical based on the law of diminishing returns, but it was also highlighted recently by TechCrunch.
TechCrunch, as we’ve noted in Kikabink News before, has a huge number of followers.
TechCrunch’s editor and founder, Michael Arrington, recently said that since TechCrunch was made one of Twitter’s ‘suggested accounts’ its followers grew from 65,573 ‘hard earned’ followers on February 11, 2009 to 158,708 followers by March 1, 2009.
As at the date of writing, the number is 227,253 – significantly higher than the 217,187 reported by Michael just a few days ago on March 12, 2009. So it seems as though TechCrunch’s number of Twitter followers is escalating along with the number of followers on Twitter in general.
But here’s the thing. Michael Arrington wonders whether all those extra thousands of followers are really as valuable as the followers TechCrunch earned the long, slow way.
Why? Because the number of visitors to TechCrunch referred from Twitter has actually DECLINED in the same period as the number of Twitter followers has grown.
Michael Arrington says that traffic from Twitter spiked in January, before TechCrunch became a ‘suggested account’ and grew from 67,000 page views to 130,000 in that month.
Then, after TechCrunch became a ‘suggested account’ in February, traffic from Twitter actually dropped by 15 percent to 111,000 page views.
If, as Michael Arrington predicts, traffic from Twitter ends up being 150,000 page views for March 2009, then the upshot is that while TechCrunch’s original 65,573 followers yielded 130,000 January page views… the extra 180,000 to 200,000 followers (or more) that TechCrunch is likely to have by the end of March will deliver only an extra 20,000 page views.
As you acquire more Twitter followers, you may end up seeing a similar trend. Especially if you use techniques that emphasize quantity over quality when it comes to getting to Twitter followers.
That’s no reason not to participate in the Twitter phenomenon, of course. We do so, albeit on a very small scale. But it IS reason to be somewhat circumspect about where all this is heading…
Sources: Erick Schonfeld, “Whoa, Twitter Mania,” TechCrunch, March 13, 2009, Michael Arrington, “The Amount And Value Of Twitter Traffic,” TechCrunch, March 12, 2009
