And at the end of the day, would you rather have a Twitter follower who essentially remains just a number, or would you rather have convertible traffic on your own website? We think Kardashian's got the long end of the stick by optimizing for influence over popularity.
We all know the roll-call of celebs who rule Twitter and other social media platforms. Lady Gaga weighs in at 6.5 million Twitter followers, for example; Britney Spears has just over 6 million; Ashton Kutcher's got 5.8 million; and even the pint-sized Justin Bieber has 5.5 million Twitter followers. Ms. Kardashian has yet to break the 5-million-followers mark as of press time.
Nevertheless, Kardashian's official website gets a ton of traffic from Twitter -- more than any of these other celebs do. In fact, her site ranks 54 of all websites that get clickthroughs from Twitter users, and she's number 20 in the entertainment category. The types of sites that outrank her are media hosting sites (Flickr, TwitPic and Vimeo, for example) and a plethora of sports and news sites.
There's a lot of conversation going on about the value of Twitter followers. Do they click on links? Do they make purchases? Do they retweet your content?
In other words, if you have a whole boatload of Twitter followers, does that necessarily mean you have a whole boatload of power on the social web?
Kardashian's stats prove that popularity and influence -- quantity and quality -- are two different things. And we think the ability to direct web traffic is a pretty big part of influence.
The socialite tweets personable, relatable clickbait. Fans are alerted about pictures of her European outfits, a contest to attend her birthday party, a breast cancer awareness drive -- the kind of content her fans clearly want to see. The rest of her tweets are social; such a statement seems obvious until you scan other streams that reek of PR and marketing influence, begging followers to buy a product or consume content. Other celeb streams are almost entirely link-free and designed to facilitate interaction around that individual's personality rather than create a desired action in the user.
In short, Kardashian's stream is optimized to gracefully direct traffic to her website. And her website is optimized for the social web, too, with tweets and blog posts prominently featured.
These days, one out of five visitors to Kardashian's site comes from Twitter. Twitter is almost referring as much traffic as Google:
