What Can a Tweet from Stephen Fry do for Your Traffic?

It’s my firm belief that the Philosophers of 23rd century will not be pondering the meaning of life, the meaning of love or the reason for our very existence. Oh no. All of that will have been answered by research commissioned by the 22nd Century global leadership coalition of Tesco and Google. Instead, the 23rd century Philosophers will be pondering:

What could a Tweet from that long passed Stephen Fry fellow do for traffic to a 21st century website?

 

Or maybe not. But whatever.

All that was just a long winded (and admittedly somewhat unnecessary) introduction to a post about that very thing: Just how much traffic can a Tweet from Stephen Fry refer to your website?

JDRF Tweeted by Fry!

We’re fortunate enough to work with a fabulous charity, JDRF, who works tirelessly on research into Type 1 Diabetes. On Friday afternoon, my beloved Stephen Fry Tweeted a link to the JDRF website.

Now not only did we have the ‘yay’ factor for JDRF getting some Stephen Fry loving, but our inner Analytics geeks rejoiced in the added data! We actually switched on real time Analytics shortly after the Tweet (who needs Corrie when you’ve got real time Google Analytics?).

A weekend has now passed and we’ve spent much of the morning crunching numbers to answer the eternal question:

Just how much traffic does a Tweet from Stephen Fry drive?!

 

Now, granted, this is just one Tweet. Which means it doesn’t allow us to analyse the difference in traffic based on time of the day, wording around the link, day of the week or any of that good stuff. But nonetheless, it was interesting to analyse traffic from Twitter after a Stephen Fry tweet.

The story can be told in an image:

But if you’re looking for numbers, JDRF’s daily visitors from Twitter over the past 2 months have averaged fewer than 10 per day. After Mr Fry’s Tweet, however:

  • Friday 11th (day of Tweet): Over 3000 visitors from Twitter
  • Saturday 12th: Over 300 visitors from Twitter
  • Sunday 13th: Over 100 visits from Twitter

Traffic from Facebook

What’s interesting is that traffic from Facebook also increased (as below), showing the same spike pattern as Twitter traffic:

So, thank you, Mr. Fry for thousands of visits to JDRF for a good cause and also for the Google Analytics insights.

Posted on by in Search

About Stacey Cavanagh

I’m the Head of Search at Tecmark and a lover of all things Internet and Apple. I’m a chronic #hashtagger, social media-er, compulsive blogger and a self confessed lover of inexcusably terrible jokes.

  • http://www.propdata.net Robert

    Well… that is not that surprising that a single tweet could generate that much traffic when you work out the number of followers that some celeb’s have.

    Although surely this must also take context into consideration. I’m not sure if Stephen Fry were to mention cupcakes that you might get the same kind of influx in visitors (then again… perhaps?).

    I’d love to see similar experiments done with different context, but thanks for confirming that something as simple as a tweet can generate a great increase in traffic.

  • http://www.twitter.com/staceycav Stacey

    Hi Robert!

    I agree – would be great to see similar data from other Tweets to different types of content, with different wording in the Tweets and so too the way in which time of day or even day of the week could impact this.

    Cheers for the comment :)