Social media is becoming a valuable resource to all web publishers and businesses, referring numerous new users to one’s web page. Indeed, small businesses have taken to social media, as Audrey Watters pointed out today over at ReadWriteWeb by noting how businesses doubled their twitter usage in 2010.
Chitika Insights has studied the potential value (or lack thereof) that traffic generated from Facebook provides a web page in terms of ad revenue, and the consensus is that the response rate of this traffic to ads is low. For a more apples to apples comparison, we decided to take a look at the two sites that have become synonymous with social media (and two sites Chitika maintains an active presence on), Facebook and Twitter.
As a source of traffic, Facebook clearly trumps Twitter, and effectively every other referring site that is not a search engine; however, Twitter does maintain a fairly significant advantage in CTR in a sample between the dates of February 14 and March 13 across the Chitika network :
Given the rise of Twitter, with a reach of around 10% of the global internet users (and growing), one must keep in mind that while Facebook is still the social media king of traffic generation, a diverse strategy of including Twitter could also provide valuable traffic to a publisher’s web page.