Measuring the impact of the Twitter ecosystem
I found this fascinating look at the Twitter ecosystem today:
My point is this. You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger. avc.com, A VC, Jan 2010
Twitter is a tricky one when it comes to measuring the reach of your campaigns. Tools such as Google Analytics offer a good insight as to the number of users who come in from Twitter.com but provide next to nothing on the users who come in from various non-browser Twitter clients, this figure is instead blended into your direct traffic.
Whilst URL shorteners and tracking parameters can still help close the gap, there are still many instances where you cannot close the tracking gap.
With expert insights suggesting that the traffic coming from these clients and the greater Twitter ecosystem is roughly 3-5 times that as you see coming from Twitter.com it really gives you something to think about as you consider your inbound traffic analysis.
