The author examines the long-term effects of tweets versus links, using a recent post as a case study. FTA: In the first 19 days, Twitter sent 23% more traffic than the Links did. However, you’ll notice that the Links traffic never goes to 0 like the Twitter traffic does, so the Links are still sending traffic — enough so that they’ll eventually surpass the Twitter traffic.
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Nice reminder that good content deserves a link, not just a Twitter mention.
So hang on... One and the same page got Tweets and links. There’s no difference in destination URL, no tracking paramter -- and now, weeks later, the impact of the two sources are differentiated how?<div></div><div>Would the amount of links, and the traffic they bring, have been different had the page *not* been supported by Tweets?</div><div></div><div>The graph supports a lot of intepretations, especially in the absence of hard values :) One theory could be that the amount of tweets and Twitter traffic at the beginning of that chart is the cause and source of the sustained link traffic later on :)</div>
Great points, Ruud. It’s obviously impossible to completely unwind the two, but what made this case particularly interesting to me was that the links and the tweets were so completely independent.The article got a small handful of meaningful links -- the two most notable being from SEOBook.com and GetRichSlowly.org. Those came from direct relationships with Aaron and J.D. and were not influenced at all by the tweets.The first tweet was also because of a direct relationship. The second major tweet may have been influenced by that one, by one or more of the blog posts, or in some other way. I don’t know the tweeter personally, so I’m not sure.Obviously this sample size is too small to draw anything terribly concrete from it. Plus, how can you compare even a single tweet with a single blog post when the two are so different? Heck, you can’t even confidently compare 2 tweets from sources with the same number of followers because the engagement of those followers might be completely different.It was just a general look at an isolated case that I thought revealed some interesting patterns that reinforced what others were saying. I definitely don’t consider it anything more significant than that :)