Just How Effective IS Twitter in Driving Traffic?

For the past several months I have been diligently researching the effectiveness of Twitter in marketing for business … particularly small business like yours and mine.  Let’s face it … social media has surpassed porn as the number one activity on the net!  And small business needs as many tools as possible to reach as many new faces as possible and as inexpensively as possible.  Twitter, being free, AND being able to reach millions of tweeple a day certainly fits the bill.

At the beginning of my research, a client had come to me saying she’d just attended a marketing seminar for authors and one of the speakers was an author who had successfully marketed her books via social media.  This author pronounced that, in order to effectively market a book/product on the net, authors would have to tweet 22 time per day!  That’s 2.75 times in an eight hour day.  As a small business owner the ROI on twittering had better be good … how can you justify spending that much time writing 22 calls to action to drive tweeple to your site and still be in compliance with Twitters rules of conduct … particularly their hefty anti-spam rules.

While all of this sounds daunting and nearly impossible to figure out I will inform  you with utmost confidence and authority that TWITTER CAN QUICKLY AND EFFECTIVELY DRIVE SUBSTANTIAL TRAFFIC TO ANY WEBSITE!

I have used my website as the proving ground for much of my research and here are some of the results:

In July 2009, I had 934 unique* visitors to my website (3,967 total). On August 1st, I began my Twitter marketing campaign using TweetSpinner as my main Twitter management tool.

In August 2009, I had 1,155 uniques (4,832 total).  In September 2009, I had 1,532 uniques (6,483 total).  In October 2009, with 13 more days to go in the month, I am already at 1,468 uniques (4,393 total) and I project 1,900+ uniques for the month.  In addition, my Alexa page rank leapt from 694,894 to 378,411!  The goal is to get Transmutation Sciences into the Top 100,000 of ALL websites!  Twitter is #3.  FaceBook is #14.

So, to delve into the numbers more deeply and determine just how much of this traffic increase Twitter was responsible for, I turned off ALL tweeting for Transmutation Sciences!  The result?  A precipitous 95.7% DROP in new visitors in just 5 days!

I use many tools to monitor my client’s website activity based on what our goal is for their respective websites.  One of the tools I use is QuantCast and I’m including a screen shot of my traffic graph to show this dramatic drop.  (Click for a larger view.)

So what’s the answer to “Just how effective is Twitter in driving traffic?” … VERY EFFECTIVE.

If you are considering using Twitter – and any other social media outlet – as an integral part of your internet marketing plan call 971-207-4492 for a consultation immediately.  As a small business, you can not afford to miss out on the dramatic increases in traffic and market exposure a clear, effective social media campaign can do for you.

* uniques / unique visitors = These are first-time visitors to your website.  While it is good to create a website with good visitor retention (aka a fan base that returns time and time again), your main goal should always be to reach out to NEW visitors in order to grow your business.