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It’s True Twitter Does Not Drive Traffic

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Image by petesimon

Derek Thompson has the details of his own look at Twitter engagement numbers over at the Atlantic.

Is the social web just a matrix of empty shares, of hollow generosity? As Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile once said (on Twitter), there is “effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.” People read without sharing, but just as often, perhaps, they share without reading.

I guess I can’t say that I’m surprised that a network that limits your message to 140 characters would be fairly shallow, can I? The interesting thing, and one I’ve been writing around recently, is that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. really are where people spend their time. So much so, that even when presented with links to other places, users don’t leave the “feed” to spend any time reading elsewhere.

Where does that leave a site owner sharing links on social networks?

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