Two posts today put some solid numbers behind a theme that has developed over the past month citing the power of Twitter for driving traffic to web sites. The meme has evolved into speculation about the disruptive power of Google search.
I’m struck by the consistency of principle that is a common thread in the development of Netscape’s Open Directory to Google to Twitter.
Michael Arrington pulls together some figures showing the growth of traffic from Twitter on Techcrunch. Direct traffic from Twitter is driving between
130,000 and 150,000 pages for Techcrunch.
Fred Wilson at avc.com goes one step further and looks at the growth in traffic to his blog from Twitter and from Facebook. Traffic to the blog from Twitter has tripled in the last six months, to 600 visits per week. Facebook traffic has grown five time to more than 250 visits per week.
Wilson is synchronizing his Twitter posts to his Facebook account; Twitter in its current form drives more visitors through content sharing by others — retweets or link posting.
In the month or so that I’ve been building this blog, I’ve seen the majority of traffic, which has grown quickly, driven from referring sites. I tweet the blog posts and have synchronized WordPress with my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. The Twitterverse drives a meaningful amount of traffic through retweets and posts.
The beauty in this is the intentionality and human intervention in the act of search. The early Netscape directory was a vision of Open Directory content: anyone could contribute to the directory, and they would develop credibility based on the quality of their s
ubmissions and the links they uncovered. The downside to the effort was that it took a lot of time and energy, and ultimately the work did not scale to the rapidly expanding size of the web.
The elegance of Google’s concept was that by tracking all of the linking activity online, the service would be able to replicate the preference that human editors would articulate in the Open Directory model: who links to who? The more links from more linked places, the higher the quality of the content.
Twitter primarily, and sites like Facebook, with their easy posting tools, leverage technology to supplement the natural instinct we have to share interesting things. It takes only a moment to post a link to something that you find engaging on Twitter; the network effect of that link, as it gets Tweeted and retweeted, is powerful. Twitter, only at the beginning of its potential scale, is already a big player in creating a consensus around rapidly shifting pools of content — what is good, what is interesting, what is timely, what is important.
By posting links to Facebook and other social media sites, you’re able to replicate some of what Twitter accomplishes, but without the rapid iteration of content sharing.
Imagine the next step, where Twitter search gets inside the tweeted pages, offers full contextual search, and ranks search results based on the frequency of tweeting and certain attributes of the content.
Suddenly you have an organic search engine, with a human editing function, that could supply more cohesive and rewarding results than Google.
Unthinkable, but entirely possible. And clearly in Twitter’s sights.
