I launched this blog yesterday and the only promotion that I did was to my Twitter followers and Facebook. I have around 20,000 followers currently and approximately 550 friends on Facebook. I promoted the blog post really late at night on the 26th and received approximately 26 visits that night with another 159 visits the next morning. Granted, I should not write blog posts late at night if my only promotion method is via Twitter as most people are asleep and probably have their updates turned off. But that’s another blog post.
What I discovered is that I have 102 visits that came directly to my blog post, 54 visits from Twitter.com, 21 from GapersBlock.com (a large Chicago blog that was kind enough to link to the post), and 15 referrals from Facebook.
Now I am not the most logical individual sometimes, so feel free to poke holes in my logic in the comments, but it seems to me that nearly 100% of the direct referrals are probably referrals from Twitter applications. If this is true then the math looks like this . . .
102 direct referrals / (102 direct referrals + 54 Twitter referrals) = 65% untracked Twitter referrals!
If that is the case then there are a TON of companies out there that are making the wrong decisions about Twitter if they are basing those decisions off of their analytics data.