Yesterday, I was looking at a break down of this site’s traffic on Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides me with all sorts of data about my site. Pretty much right down to what my readers are wearing when they read my posts.
Here’s a chart that kind of surprised me. It’s my referral sources. Anytime, someone got to my site from another site (e.g. google, the Hartford Courant, Facebook, and Twitter):
For reasons known only to God, I have 662 followers on Twitter. For a point of reference, I have 627 “friends” on Facebook.
Guess which slice of that pie chart accounts for twitter referrals?
See the 5.50% above the yellow piece of the pie. Look right and you’ll see a smaller light blue piece. Look to the right of that and you’ll see a smaller lime green piece. That little lime green piece represents referrals from twitter. That’s right, twitter accounts for 2.53% of referrals to my site.
When I write a post that I think is worth reading, I generally share it on both Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook is the large green piece of the pie. It accounts for 19.47% of my referrals.
Prior to seeing this chart, I would have assumed the numbers would be reversed. My tweets are open to the world. My Facebook page is behind a wall. Other lawyers and legal type people follow me on twitter and sometimes retweet my links. My Facebook page – it primarily consists of people I went to 4th grade with.
I’m not sure what this data means. It’s possible my site is an outlier and for the vast majority of sites those numbers would be reversed. But I’m not so sure that’s true. I think in blogging, life, and the practice of law, having a personal connection with people goes a long way.
It’s the difference between putting up a billboard (twitter) and generating business from friends (facebook).
If you blog, do you get more referrals from Twitter or Facebook?