When you hear about how successful some affiliates are at using Twitter, it’s hard to ignore it as a potential traffic source. For Shoemoney, it’s his second biggest blog traffic source, and Ted Murphy get’s 40% of his blog traffic from Twitter. But those are blogs, not affiliates sites, so the question still remains: does twitter convert for affiliates? Will twitter-networking drive sales?

Well, some numbers from Hitwise indicate that Twitter doesn’t even drive that much traffic to ecommerce in the first place — at least in the UK, anyway.

During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.

Does this mean that Twitter is a waste of time? Maybe not. As the Hitwise blog posts goes on to note, Dell claims to have generated $3m in sales via Twitter. So what does this all mean for affiliates?

Well, for starters, maybe most “transactional websites” just haven’t started using Twitter strategically.

But ore importantly, it’s also possible that many ecommerce sites that do use Twitter aren’t using it properly. Twitter is a social network, and a social network is a place where people interact with other people. So using Twitter to post repeat adver-tweets is going to fail.

A strategic use of Twitter would be using not just as a brand, but as a person who builds actual relationships with other people. People are on Twitter to interact, not spend money, so they have to trust you before they’re going to buy from you.

So can affiliates use Twitter to drive referrals? Probably. But only if you’re:

1. focusing on building actual relationships by interacting in a meaningful,
2. and reaching out to a targeted audience that might actually be interested in the products you promote.

Once people trust you, then they might visit your site or blog, and subsequently convert into referral, but you have to first earn that trust, and you’re not going to do that by spamming them.

That being said, before investing too much of their time in Twitter, affiliates should bear in mind that it’s just one of several potential acquisition channels. As Hitwise pointed out, search is still driving way more ecommerce traffic. So while affiliates are building up their trust and Twitter network, they should also keep doing what still works for them elsewhere.

The rest is here:
Can Twitter Drive Sales?