The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting

[Commentary] Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter. Is the social web just a matrix of empty shares, of hollow generosity? There used to be a vague sense that Twitter drives traffic, and traffic drives renown (or fame, or pride, or whatever word defines the psychic benefit of public recognition). Instead, the truth is that Twitter can drive one sort of renown (there are some people who are Twitter-famous), and traffic affords a different psychic currency. But they are nearly independent variables.

The more sophisticated takeaway is that Twitter is worthless for the limited purpose of driving traffic to your website, because Twitter is not a portal for outbound links, but rather a homepage for self-contained pictures and observations. (The irony is that the more journalists consider Twitter a portal, the better Twitter becomes as a home for other people to stay, including other journalists.) Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.