Earlier tonight, I tweeted about the Ellen Show reaching 500 thousand followers on Twitter in just three weeks.
A few minutes later, Robert Scoble liked the tweet on FriendFeed. Robert routes his FriendFeed over to Twitter, so it quickly showed up on Robert’s Twitter feed…
When I tweet a link, it usually only gets about 20-25 clicks but, in this case, the clicks went through the roof according to Bit.ly. As soon as Robert liked that tweet, the link that I posted got over 900 clicks in about 6 minutes.
A few thoughts on this:
- A simple Like or Retweet from an A-Lister like Robert can drive significant traffic. This is hard proof that, with the right exposure, traffic from Twitter can achieve something similar to the Digg Effect.
- The Twitter Effect can be very short lived. In this case, my tweet didn’t get many other retweets, so the number of clicks quickly went down after about 10 minutes.
- Bit.ly provides great analytics for measuring stuff like this. Is it useful enough to justify the recent $2 million round of funding? I guess we’ll see.
