More reasons to quit playing around with Twitter

More grist to my social-media-marketing is useless mill. Two small but significant social media success stories that generated nothing useful at all.

First example:

This is from a client account on twitter. I tweet occasionally for them, nothing special going on.

A week ago, out of the blue came a really nice recommendation from a tweep in the same industry sector who I had followed without knowing that the client had worked occassionally with them.

She has nearly 2,000 follewers so I could have hoped for a little bit of action, right?

Wrong. Analytics showed 2 visitors to the client's site from Twitter. And no spike in direct hits at all.

So nobody came. Yeah maybe somebody searching some day for what the client does just might come across the recommendation and act on it. Maybe. But then again, maybe not. There was no useful keywords in the tweet. Just the recommendation and the clients twitter account name.

Second example:

Another client got a sudden insurge from Stumbleupon. An old page must have been restumbled and oooh wow did get lots of traffic. Maybe 1,000 from Stumbleupon over 3 days.

But did they stick around? No.

Did they look at more than 1.1 pages? No.

Did a single one of them convert? Of course not.

Nothing new in this I know.

It just confirms me in my stick-in-the-mud belief that the industry obsession with social media and Twitter is just so misplaced. And that time spent elsewhere (linkbuilding) is just so much more likely to generate financial rewards.