Normalkid:Arnold Kim

In case you don’t follow web, tech, and social news sites, there’s a vocal minority that claims that Twitter is the next best thing since sliced bread.

One of the arguments of pro-Twitter bloggers is that Twitter is quickly becoming one of their top traffic referrers based on their web logs. A particularly noteworthy graph is from Calacanis who describes that Twitter has sent ~45,000 people to his startup (Mahalo) in the past 6 months.

That’s an impressive number, of course, and helps drive interested entrepreneurs and bloggers to start their own twitter accounts to try to recreate this effect. And before I get to my point, Twitter is certainly a great self promotional tool, and I think it’s a great tool to interact with your peers and others interested in you and your business. However… that being said, there’s some fine print to these statistics.

The way Twitter works is that people “follow” you to see your updates. So you tell your friends, your fans, your customers to “follow” you on twitter. It’s kinda like a private RSS feed for them. They see updates from you and anyone else they follow. (me on twitter)

So, of course, if you link to your site, people who follow you might click through. That’s great… but it’s a closed pool of people. A closed pool of people who already know who you are and were interested enough to “Follow” you on Twitter.

So, how many of those ~45,000 visitors to Mahalo were actually unique individuals? No more than 21,000 (or whatever number of followers Calacanis had at the time). And these are people who already have an active interest in Calacanis. Realistically the 45,000 may represent only 4000 distinct people clicking on multiple links over those 6 months. In many ways, you are preaching to the choir. And while there is value in that, perhaps not as much as the raw numbers would lead you to believe.

As a comparison, I think there’s more (different?) value in 45,000 visitors from Google or scattered across multiple other sites, as those possibly represent “fresh” visitors.

That being said, I think Calacanis is doing it right, in that he’s driving traffic to his startup rather than his blog (where he recruited his Followers). I think if you are simply trying to drive Twitter traffic back to your blog (or where ever you recruited your Followers), then you are simply driving the same people back to the site who would have gone their anyway (via Web or RSS). There’s no harm in that, but then the warm-fuzzy feeling you get from your Twitter referrals may be even more misleading.

As a blogger or site owner, you are keenly aware of the activities of other sites on the internet, especially in your field. In particular, you might notice when other sites properly credit your site for either original news or even finding a particularly unique link. This business, however, can get messy with sites accusing other sites of wrongdoing or simply poor sportsmanship. As a result proper attribution can become a big issue. It comes to my mind now as TheInquisitr wrote an excellent summary of their linking and attribution policy.

In some cases the offense is clear: exclusive content or screenshots that are simply “lifted”, republished and no attribution given to you. Of course, this is the most offensive of actions, and fortunately, it is a relatively rare occurrence. Ironically, this used to be a bigger problem with mainstream news sites. As blogs were just emerging as a news source, I’d frequently see “legitimate” news sites reference emerging news with a wave-of-the-hands “word on the internet is…” and refuse to link to the original sources. Fortunately, this trend has dwindled as the line between blogs and media have blurred.

An equally deceptive, yet growing trend I’ve noticed is one where sites will rewrite original content and even include a link back to the original source, but hide the link in a way that makes it entirely un-obvious that the original site even exists.

Instead of writing “BlogXYZ.com writes…”, they might just report the news “We’ve heard that ABC is going to be great…” and then maybe link one obscure word later in the text back to the original source. While they’ve technically linked back to the source, the end result is the same as the first scenario, taking credit for the information.

I can’t really offer a great solution on this issue. I do know what the end result: you are far less likely to link to them, which, in turn, over time, will result in them being far less likely to link to you. This circle tends to feed on itself.

So, in the end, play nice and attribute properly.