The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver

from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology by Fred

I have been looking over the referrer logs of our portfolio companies and have been paying special attention to social media (facebook and twitter in particular) and I've been noticing that both services are making significant moves up in most every referrer log. I can't reveal the specifics due to confidentiality, but there are some companies that count facebook and twitter as the second and third most important sources of traffic after the big daddy google.

Mike Arrington posted TechCrunch's twitter traffic trends today and I figured I'd do the same here and also show facebook traffic trends.

Here's the past six months of Twitter traffic to this blog:

The traffic to this blog from twitter has tripled in the past six months, from around 600 visits per week to over 2,000 visits per week.

And here's the past six months of Facebook traffic to this blog:
 
The traffic to this blog from facebook has gone up 5x in the past six months, from around 50 visits per week to over 250 visits per week.

I send all of my twitter posts to facebook via the twitter facebook app so I am publishing the same number of links to both services. But the interesting thing is that on twitter, my posts are only responsible for about 4,000 of the 28,000 visits in the past six months. The vast majority of the visits are coming from others either posting links to this blog or retweeting my posts. I don't think that happens very much on facebook (yet). You can see that in action because the twitter traffic comes from 952 accounts and the facebook traffic comes from only 55 accounts.

I expect that these numbers will continue to rise as twitter's user base grows and the new users become more sophisticated about sending links and retweeting. I also expect facebook's numbers to increase as the changes they are making to facebook encourage more of the same kind of activity on facebook.

Links are the currency of the web and traffic is money so these are important trends for our portfolio companies and for everyone who does business on the web.