How much value is there in a tweet?

Everyone knows it’s important to have a presence on multiple social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine seem to be the bare minimum.

Maintaining them all can feel like a never ending game of whack-a-mole, and often the only prize is a “favourite” or a retweet.

Rarely do we see so much as a penny exchange hands directly due to our social media activity. So what’s the point?

Measuring social

As the months go by, we’re seeing a consistent trend at GoSquared – as referrers from websites and search queries go down, social traffic is on the up.

But how do visitors from social compare to search and CPC advertising?

Depending on the type of site, the figures are fascinating – ecommerce, publishing and marketing sites perform very differently.

From aggregate data across the GoSquared network of sites, search traffic can account for anything up to around 50% of all traffic.

While social traffic isn’t reaching volumes comparable with search just yet, visitors from social sources account for approximately 5% of traffic.

What’s more exciting is the growing importance of social – in just 6 months we’ve seen social traffic grow by 15% on many sites, often displacing search and paid campaigns, indicating a gradual yet significant shift in digital marketing practices.

Quality not quantity

Depending on the type of site, social sources can drive dramatically more engaged visitors, but that should be expected – it’s likely your Facebook and Twitter followers are some of your biggest fans, so if they’re not engaged by your most recent content then who will be?

In fact, despite only accounting for around 5% of total traffic, visitors from social referrers often account for a much higher percentage of conversions and also average much higher average engagement levels, indicating the power of our peers in influencing purchasing decisions.

Comparison of social networks

Google+ is by far the highest driver of traffic to sites across the… Just kidding.

Facebook is dwarfing almost all other social networks as a traffic source, with Twitter following in second place.

Pinterest is an exciting source as it is clearly driving significant volumes of traffic to ecommerce sites. Google+, for all its criticism, is growing in volume, seeing a 5% increase in 6 months.

Google+ cannot be ignored for its impact on search rankings, too, so it potentially has an indirect impact on traffic that’s even harder to measure.

No Tweet is an island