From time to time I use my personal blog for little experiments. I recently hooked up my blog to my Twitter account to see what kind of effect it would have on traffic. I’d start by saying it is positive. Below is an image of the stats for this site over the last few days. See below for an explanation of each referer and my conclusion on what effect being social has on website traffic.
Referers to johnarobb.com
- Organic traffic from Google. Most of my search traffic from Google is because of either my Tablet Recipe or my Family History.
- Facebook traffic is mostly because I integrated my tweets as my Facebook status message. So even though the traffic appears to be coming from Facebook it is really as a result of my twitter activity.
- Well if it’s coming from twitter it’s because I’ve posted a link to my blog. The interesting thing here is that twitter sends almost half of what Google sends to my blog. Is Google less important?
- Image searches are mostly looking for picture I took for my tablet recipe. I guess it just goes to show that blended search is a reality.
- Buzzmachine is the blog of @jeffjarvis. I commented on his blog after reading a tweet. It turns out those URL links from comments actually help drive traffic.
- Davidairey.com is another blog I commented on. If you leave thoughtful comments people will follow the link to your site.
- A link to my family history page
- Another link to my family history page
- more image searches
- you really need to believe in this blended search thing.
First a couple of caveats. My blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic. Maybe my sample size is too small. I’d point to stats from other sites for comparison but none of the other sites I have access to use social media to this extent.
As an added bonus when I link to out to other blogs via my tweets those links are listed in the ping backs for my blog. Here’s an example of how my tweet generated a ping back to my blog:
Waxing UnLyrical ping back
Conclusion:
Using social media has long-term SEO and traffic benefits that should not be underestimated. Links tend to live a long time. The act of providing insight via tweet or via comments earns you some equity in the link economy. Use that equity wisely.
I might also post this entry at my SEO Blog.
