For the past 9 months, since April of 2009, we have offered significant Twitter support for every link submitted to DZone. We make it easy for you to tweet any link, easy to sign up to follow DZone (and several thousand have), and easy to spot the biggest and most popular links.
As of this moment we have provided instant tweet support and shortened URLs for 399,864 links. In total, these links have garnered just 273,470 clicks. Now, some of you may say “a quarter-million clicks, that’s not too bad” but the truth is that this represents less than a week’s worth of normal clicks – a pathetic week at that!
In other words, after 9 months of steady support for Twitter, the sum total of the click-through to your blogs and websites really comprises only a few extra days worth of our normal traffic. Twitter adds less than 1 click to the attention the average DZone link receives. We’ve given lots of valuable screen real-estate and valuable time to supporting twitter, but I’m not sure the developer audience really cares.
What do you think? Has it been worthwhile to support twitter at your site? Have you captured any quantitative or qualitative data that supports how you feel? I know Twitter is all the rage, but it is honestly hard to believe that DZone members benefit much from all the space and attention we give to Twitter. In fact, it feels like we’re just helping to fuel the hype wave.
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If I had to guess, it’s because the generated tweet text starts with @dzone. The only people that will see these links are those followers that also follow dzone. That’s very few of my followers. The Twitter support on my own site provided by Backtweets provides a good deal of my traffic (even though miniscule to dzone). Try changing that format to RT @dzone and see what you get?
Great idea! We’ll give that a shot and see if it alters the numbers. Thanks!
Here is a list of links for people Dzone is following on Twitter: http://tlink.linkstore.ru?u=dzone
They are also using @Dzone rather than RT @dzone
I also think RT may help.
Hello Rick,
I am not a specialist of Twitter, but it is supposed to be “good” because it would be used as a search engine by some people. I think that when people do this, they use “hashtags”, that is they would look for “#java” and not “java”. Maybe you could use the dzone categories associated to the links to generate automatically the hashtags.
Thank you for the good work and good resources provided by DZone and all the best for 2010.
@Wynn Netherland
OK, your “RT” idea is implemented and deployed. We’ll track results and see if we can measure any uptick.
I think that many people are not aware that there is a “tweet” functionality on dzone and how that works.
There are some blogs that are using auto post on twitter. So it can be done @DzonePopularLinks and @DzoneNewLinks with auto posting on twitter. So someone can subscribe on RSS or Twitter.
I don’t use the Tweet link as I tend to tweet DZone links myself. It comes down to speed of tweets. It’s ridiculous and irrational but it’s quicker for me to click on my Firefox Twitter plugin and tweet than it is to walk through the Tweet function on a non-Twitter site.
But I’d imagine after the first time I do it, I’ll end up doing it all the time.
One of those habitual barriers that once broken is never re-established. In fact, that pretty much exemplifies my use of Twitter in the first place.