Are You Getting More Tweets Than You Know Of?- Click here http://bit.ly/nZI0iT for full article

Are You Getting More Tweets Than You Know Of?- Click here http://bit.ly/nZI0iT for full article

Social media marketing has become vitally important to businesses large and small. Twitter is one of many useful and popular ways to connect and interact directly with customers through social media. Followers on Twitter receive updates from a business that can help drive traffic to websites or Facebook pages, and that can subsequently drive business and sales in general.

Now a recent report from social media analytics firm awe.sm has suggested that many businesses' analytics software, which examines the sources of web traffic, may be seriously under-estimating Twitter referrals and the amount of traffic coming in to a website from Twitter.

Twitter referrals are complicated to analyze because Twitter can be accessed through a number of different other websites or programs. Links clicked on in third-party clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie may not register as Twitter referrals, and websites like LinkedIn and Facebook that repost Twitter updates may similarly disguise Twitter's role in a referral.

awe.sm's study found that only 24.4% of website traffic derived from Twitter had twitter.com as the referrer. 62.6% of the traffic that was actually coming from Twitter came without any referrer information at all and 13.0% of traffic came with another site as the referrer when Twitter was actually responsible for the link.

This problem with analytics programs not accurately counting referrals from Twitter is only increasing as more users access Twitter from desktop clients or mobile devices. When users click links from Twitter or other sources while in a non-browser client like a mobile device or even an e-mail program like Outlook, the links are recorded as "Direct Traffic" in an analytics program.

Businesses are likely very concerned with using social media in the most cost and time-effective way possible. If analytics software is failing to accurately tally the amount of traffic coming in from Twitter, businesses may think that frequently updating their Twitter feed it is not a worthwhile investment of time and energy. awe.sm's study is significant because it demonstrates just how valuable Twitter can be for driving a business' web traffic, but how under-represented it may be in analytics.

Businesses focused on developing an increased social media presence should take a closer look at their analytics data to determine how much referral traffic is truly coming from Twitter. Only then can decisions be made about how much time to spend tweeting. The results may be surprising, and surprisingly in favor of Twitter.