Twitter is exploding right now and is the 83rd most visited website in the UK according to Hitwise. With the growth of Twitter has come a big shift in the way people are interacting with blogs.
Aaron Wall was first to spot the changed calling Twitter Corrosive to Online Marketing:
In the past when you did something quite cool and attention-worthy people would reference it on their blogs. But now in the age of Twitter, many people mention your stuff on Twitter.
This can be good if they have thousands of Twitter followers, but if most the people mentioning a topic are all in the same small tight knit space then you are only reaching a fraction of a fraction of the potential distribution you would have before the age of Twitter.
The way blogs become popular is by being mentioned lots of times on other popular blogs. It’s very hard to become popular using social networks alone. If blog readers are deciding to spread interesting links via Twitter instead of blogging about it on their own sites then new blogs will struggle to gain readership.
To try and gain more market share on Blogstorm I installed a button at the end of each post to allow people to easily share the story via Twitter. It works great to get people sharing the post but the displaying of Tweets part isn’t working at present.
What has been very apparent since the plugin was installed is that comments have dropped significantly. People would prefer to click a button that sends the same Tweet everybody else is sending than leave a comment in the normal way.
I guess there is a decision to be made – more people Tweeting my posts or more people leaving blog comments. As somebody who very rarely leaves comments on blogs I suggest Twitter is more important.
What do you think?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting points you raise, twitter will potentially of course give you more reach. Also remember methods such as Stumbleupon, where you can potentially find lots of instants new subscribers.
I still believe that if you write very good content you will eventually get found and attract repeat visitors. But agree that with less people commentating it will take a lot longer.
Interesting that comments have dropped off as obviously you are severely limited with the depth of communication on Twitter. Personally I would prefer to have comments on my blog for the simple reason that conversation tracking on Twitter is not very easy.
I guess it depends on whether you want to actually own the discussion of your articles or not…
To be honest i completely understand why you might agree with Aaron’s comments on Twitter corroding the blogosphere but i have to wholeheartedly object and dismiss it as another bulldust (to steal a technical term from home & away/neighbours) Nietzchean ‘God is Dead’ bandwagon which gets lovingly regurgitated about something every year.
It may *look* like twitter is killing off blogging, but i’d say there is nothing terminal about it. It’s rather a cull of a certain type of low quality blog content, namely signalfire, and a much needed one at that. You know the types of posts i mean – the 3 line ones stuffed with links (and anchortext) that say “so and so has just said such and such about this and that somewhere, here, there and everywhere”.
Twitter’s provided a space to push friends and memes around the web, and taken all the lame content out of the blogoshere that has amounted to little more than pointless self aggrandising press releases. Thank the dead gods!
Find me on Twitter
I don’t think it’s killing blogging, just making it harder for people to gain traffic to new blogs. Every link shared on Twitter rather than a real blog is one less to help your search engine rankings.
More comments from Patrick AltoftMy mistake, point taken – had just read this 2008 blogging is dead article and it had coloured my perspective! Nonetheless, it’s arguably a good thing as it stops blog networks getting too powerful and affecting the impartiality’ of search results. Tweets appear in search results anyway so it’s not like much is lost – and also the structure of twitter wouldnt make any sense to pass authority even if it could. The destination link is still going to get the traffic, but the middleman/blog may not – which reduces the incentive to splog and rewards quality content with more traffic.
Also, as you and others have said here, twitter is no good at this kind of thing – a discussion. It’s just mingling and banter. From my, perhaps n00b, point of view following you on twitter and dipping into your blog posts, made the transition to participate in discussion happening here easier, as it couldn’t happen there – the point is, twitter made it harder to ignore (or better put, accidentally overlook) you as a blogger and authoritative voice that has something to say about the industry i’m in. The paradox almost co-ordinates the sweetspot of community attention – it’s the grapevine that sparks cat-killing curiosity
It’s seems only appropriate to leave a comment after your post about Twitter and comments!
I have found the “Twit this” button at the end of my posts to be very useful in extending both the reach of, and interaction with, my blog rather than a way of distracting people away from it.
As people have re-tweeted my blog post about the laptop I’m giving away, I have had more people leave comments than on any other post I’ve written – and the referrer stats show over 20% of traffic came from Twitter.
I do agree with the thought that Twitter and Re-tweeting especially dilute the value and traffic of a blog post, but I think used in the right way, Twitter is an invaluable source of traffic and insight.
To me twitter is a fantastic source of traffic. Have actually over 30% of traffic coming to blogs according to my referrer stats.
That is a lot of editorial votes and no link juice…
Twitter isn’t going to go the distance. It has no business model to speak of, and in my experience most people I know who start using it get bored after a couple of months because the simplicity/immediacy of it – dropping a sentence or two about what you’re doing right now – is also it’s undoing. It either coalesces into small groups of friends who use it like a chat program, or it quickly loses its interest value compared to more feature-rich social environments like Facebook.
I simply using Twitter only to notice my follower about my newest blog post, other than that such as event and other contest that i have been went through are being posted on Facebook. Another thing i used to do was only to gain more information from my upline. So using twitter doesn’t seems worth so much on me
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