Some of you have noted from this blog that I am a fan of Twitter and have urged others at Incisive to sign-up and learn how to use it. In fact, my sense of Twitter has changed over the last few months. As an individual I find it a bit frustrating--there's too much spam and self-promotion for my taste. And increasingly I find that there's too little in the way of meaningful discussion. As more people join, it feels like the opportunity for relationship building has been strained, which I think is a real shame. And I am increasingly skeptical about the value of Twitter as a business development tool for law firms and other relationship-oriented businesses.

Nonetheless, Twitter is an increasingly valuable engine for finding information--particularly links--and for driving traffic to websites. I enjoy the recommendations of the people I follow for interesting articles and news analysis, and I believe there is real power from tapping into our Twitter networks for news and business ideas. Most importantly, my theory has been that we can use our growing networks of Twitter followers to drive traffic to Incisive websites, promote upcoming events, and help our audience build contact with our editors and reporters.

Our metrics are beginning to prove out some of those theories. Month-by-month, the traffic we receive to our websites from Twitter sources has been growing, with May traffic up 19% vs. April. The numbers are still small--Twitter traffic is still under 1% of our total pageviews--but that growth rate is impressive, reflecting the increased attention we are paying to posting links and tweets about our work.

More importantly, that traffic appears to be valuable. The web metrics show that those who come to our sites via Twitter stay with us for a full minute longer than the average visitor. And they return to our sites after they leave, improving our "visits per unique user" metric, which we have said is one of the Key Performance Indicators which we want to improve. Customers who stay with us longer and are repeat visitors have greater value to us and to our advertisers.

Interestingly, those who come to our sites from Twitter read fewer pages per visit than our average user. That could be because they are following a link to a specific article and are less interested in traveling around our site. It also could be that they are anxious to get back to Twitter, to continue whatever dialogue they were engaged in or search they were conducting there in the first place. More time on our sites and fewer pageviews per visit means that these Twitter visitors are staying longer on any given page--good news if you are an advertiser and have an ad on that page. And a challenge to us to figure out how to get them to click through to more pages and more information while they are with us.

I don't want to over-state those metrics. As I said above, the amount of traffic coming from Twitter users is still quite low and building it up will clearly take some time. But initial results would say that the Twitter audience has a value to us, and that we should keep testing our approach to see which of our postings work (ie. are clicked on or get retweeted) and which ones don't seem as effective.

I'd be interested to hear from other Twitter users about their experiences, both as individual users and in terms of achieving our editorial and business goals. What are you finding works for you, and what are you doing differently?

If you would like more information on web metrics, contact Grace Yanez at law.com in NY with your questions.