This is my first post in a while, and thought I would focus on social media topics and how a Twitter scale might be needed if I'm going to get rich quick...

My Twitter account has close to 1000 followers, which is not an amazing number but still a decent enough to have an effect on referral traffic patterns (and it's a nice, even figure).  So what benefit is 1000 followers to your site if you don't tweet or promote your site directly?

I'm not a full-time Twitter guru, and have other accounts that I manage on behalf of clients that generate more interest, so my thought is with my own account how much traffic would I get out of people visiting my site via my profile link because they wanted to learn more about my agency?  This is different to a number of Twitter accounts who actively tweet and encourage people to visit their website.  I need to know the value of that profile URL for my agency.

So most people agree that Twitter has been one of the fastest growth social applications in history, with CNET showing really really fast growth of the service compared to other sites such as Facebook. Twitter showed growth of 1382% from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009, compared to Facebook with only 228% growth in that same period.  Even with such impressive growth figures, Facebook still has a higher retention rate, more time spent on the site and an extra 58 million US users. Also, the growth of Twitter figures has already been disputed, with other services like Tweetdeck and services using the API often not included in these stats. So is it worthwhile focusing your efforts on Facebook while Twitter continues to build?

What number of followers would you need if you were to just drive visits via your profile URL? Based on my Google analytics data, it seems around 15% of my followers visited my site via the Twitter profile URL.  Even if you are not proactive, you can still get a number of extra visitors, but this can be increased through DMs and tweets about your services that drive people to your site. 

Another interesting factor is what happens when you slow down your initial interest or time spent on your Twitter account? The chart below shows the slowdown in the amount of accounts I followed actually affecting the amount of referral traffic to my domain www.thelostagency.com.  Since I have slowed down the amount of new accounts I'm choosing to follow, it seems that so does the traffic my Twitter profile generates.

Nielsen outlined the issue with US users having a 60% churn rate (drop out) on the social service, but having improved over the last 12 months from a high of 70%.  What that does mean is a large portion of the followers that you have may be inactive accounts, so should you cut them out of your account so you have a more realistic number of followers?  This may also explain why traffic from your Twitter account may reduce over time.  A quick way to clean up these users is UnTweeps, which allows you to remove inactive accounts that haven't tweeted in 7, 14, 30, 60, 90 or 180 days.  

So what about the other items of news that I often tweet about, such as MarketingMag posts or AdAge articles that I read and found interesting? Since I have been tracking my tweets with UrlZen, there has been around 7,000 extra visitors driven to these articles and sites of interest.  So if I had this content hosted on my own blog, as many companies do, that could have been an extra 7,000 visitors that I could have driven to my website in 3 months.  This is a sizable amount for many companies who would be happy to get that many extra visitors in a year, but how does my increase in followers affect the power of my tweets?

As my followers have increased, so has the number of visitors who visit the site in my tweets, as shown in the chart below (an average trend of 10 to 15 clicks per tweet).  The chart also shows an increase in more tweets being re-tweeted as my followers increase. 

Note: 5 points of data were removed that showed successful tweets that were re-tweeted generating 200-400 clicks to the site/article.  These popular tweets skewed the scale of the data and made it unreadable on such a small image.  

To sum up the post, have other people found their Twitter accounts or clients accounts capturing enough followers to begin to replace other paid campaigns such as email marketing, AdWords or Facebook?

While I believe Twitter does have a place in a social media campaign, you need to start examining whether you are spending your time just driving traffic to other people's sites or if you have the resources to host a summarised version on your blog with a link to the full article.  This is not a call for blogs to rip off other people's content, but is there a smarter way you can benefit your website/blog?

Also, if you are not tracking your tweets/retweets as to how much traffic you can potentially drive to a website, you might be missing out on a valuable selling point if you are a professional blogger...