Cuttings #4: Vindicated!

Twitter never bothered me anyway

I've long felt like a lone voice saying that Twitter wasn't actually a signifiant source of traffic for many publications. Networking? Sure! Story-finding and eye witness media? Great! Traffic? Not so much.

Sure, it's not universally true. For niche, political titles it always mattered. It was also always my biggest social acquisition channel here (but no longer…). But for many mainstream sites, it was negligible. I once had a former student who was leading social at a UK tabloid in to speak, and they barely touched on Twitter, as it was so low down their list of priorities.

And now NPR has found that leaving Twitter barely impacted their traffic. Here's the figures:

A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped.

Vindicated!

As always, look hard at your Twitter traffic — and consider if that's the best way you could be spending your time. Could you get more impact for the same effort elsewhere?

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible | Nieman Reports

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.

Nieman Reportsgbullard

Is the SEO era over, too?

Ian Betteridge, talking sense about the likely impact of AI-driven search: