Driving Traffic with Twitter

Reports suggest that social networking is now more popular than email. Twitter in particular grew 33% in only a month according to Compete data. Skittles increased its own traffic by 1332% in one day after a campaign that sent Skittles.com directly to a Tweet-stream (the site has since moved to different strategies of a similar nature like a Facebook page and currently a Wikipedia entry, which is in itself another interesting story).

Many brands large and small are realizing the potential that Twitter provides. "As exciting as it may be to hear about what your friends, or total strangers for that matter, ate for breakfast, some companies are realizing that a more effective use of Twitter is to mine it for clients, recruit employees and answer customer service questions," notes Kim Hart with the Washington Post.

Twitter is becoming a primary traffic source for many sites as John Battelle points out. This will only continue to become truer as real-time search continues to grow. "Social search has been predicted (and funded) for years," says Battelle. "It's finally happening. The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions. Both will continue, but it's increasingly clear why Google's obsessed with Facebook (and Facebook with Twitter). And they are not alone."

Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal and many others expect Twitter to eventually be acquired by Google. "Twitter is becoming an important communications channel–intrinsic to the web," says Beal. "Aside from the being able to pick up the company for a fraction of the $15 billion Google has in cash, Twitter is a key component of the search engines' ambitious goal: to organize the world's information." Beal finds what he perceives to be hints in the following interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

And again, there is of course that whole need for real-time search thing. But Twitter's finally just getting its own search in the spotlight (you can search within your own friends/followers with Twellow now) . There are even featured users showcased, which may or not be an indication of the widely speculated-upon revenue model for the company (Twitter might even start serving local news too).

"When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, 'In due time,' says Twitter CEO Evan Williams in a quick bio-piece chronicling his professional life up to the present. "They forget that we're only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors."

The average user doesn't care about how Twitter is monetizing its business though. And the users are what drive any success that it will ever have. Users are clearly finding plenty to get out of the service. It hasn't jumped the shark yet.