Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped.
“NPR LOSES HALF OF ALL TWITTER FOLLOWER CLICKS - COLLAPSE IMMINENT - SOMETHING SOMETHING WOKE MEDIA” - Some fuckwit right now
NPR is one of those big names in media with enough inertia that they can survive without just the usual social media bump a lot of other smaller sources rely on. Especially since theyre a big podcast giant at this point.
Does the “social media bump” definitely exist, especially for Twitter?
Even this article seems to indicate it didn’t. Less than 2% of their page views were coming through Twitter. That’s practically a rounding error, in spite of them at the time having quite a huge account.
Do people really click links and leave the site in any meaningful numbers? Click through, linger, read articles? Or do they just read the headline preview and then go off on their opinions? Especially for a serious, careful news organization like NPR, I really doubt it.
You’re on Twitter to Tweet, not click links and read articles.
Twitter’s value, I feel, was always in news discussion – not article reading – and #brand nonsense. There’s really no good reason for any major news agency to be actively posting their content to it.
My understanding is clickthrough on Twitter has always been pretty low as compared to Facebook or Reddit.
People generally don’t go to Twitter to click on articles.
