Results to the Lists and Voting Observations - Overview
Are SEO’s and PPC experts more effective at driving referral traffic to a web site from Twitter than SMM specialists? That could be the conclusion based on data I’ve collected from a series of polls, so far.
A few weeks ago I started running some lists on this blog. My goal was to thank so many great contributors for posting relevant and useful information which would be useful to anyone engaged in online marketing. Some people are established, and well known. There were five lists SEO, PPC, SMM, Links, and Cross-Channel (meaning they fit in 2+ categories).
I’ve known many of these people for years, since before I started Eightfold Logic. I used a vote driven format, because I know polls always draw attention, but also because I thought their might be some interesting data to report. After a couple of system crashes, I’ve finally completed compiling the data and expect to begin publishing the results next week.
While I’ll publish the detailed lists later, I wanted to share out some interesting summary data in the meantime, and get your thoughts and input on a surprising result. Perhaps most interestingly to me: why is it that tweets by SMM specialists in support of the list of Social Marketers generated the lowest click through rates?
This first chart shows how many unique individuals posted, or reposted, a link on Twitter promoting each channel’s list. As you can see, the greatest volume of unique activity was for the Cross Channel and SEO lists. This total is not the number of tweets, but rather the number of unique individual who tweeted about the lists, and used Bit.ly for url shortening purposes. I selected just the bit.ly tweets as it’s simple to track.
This is where it gets interesting. Despite the unique activity levels for the SMM and PPC lists, the Social Marketer’s self-promotions drew the lowest average number of referrals per tweet. Could it be that SEO’s and PPC’s are the most effective Tweeters?
I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts as to why this is.
As for the raw numbers for these graphs:
| SEO | PPC | SMM | Links | Cross Channel | |
| # of names on poll | 29 | 26 | 24 | 32 | 42 |
| # of unique Twitter posters (who used Bit.ly) | 42 | 24 | 22 | 27 | 49 |
| Average # of referrals per tweet | 13.7 | 13.5 | 5.9 | 12.0 | 10.1 |
Details of each list’s results next week.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
Richard - @rzwicky
Tags: link building, linking strategies, links, marketers, metrics, ppc, referral traffic, search, search engine market, Search Engines, Search Metrics, search referrals, search traffic, SEM, SEO, SEO Link Building, SES, Social Link Building Marketplace, social marketing