These are the most powerful and most recognized brands on twitter (based on their Twitter Grade).

via The 100 Most Powerful Brands On Twitter.

Twitter drives four times as much traffic as you think it does, say awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss and his investor Mark Suster in a minor media assault today.

That’s because traditional analytics tools don’t always give an accurate understanding of social media traffic. For instance, when users click on links from desktop and mobile clients rather than browsers, many analytics tools label this as “direct traffic,” which is supposed to mean people who went to your URL independently of clicking on a link to it somewhere else. Strauss describes this measurement technique as “arcane.”

And more broadly, unlike other referrers such as the Web sites for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, Twitter doesn’t rewrite or tag its outgoing links or frame linked Web pages to maintain attribution and/or a consistent experience and/or prevent phishing. (Though Twitter has started doing some of this with its t.co URL shortener.)

via Awe.sm Guys Say: Don’t Believe Your Referrer Logs – Liz Gannes – Social – AllThingsD.

It’s not only about Twitter for Bit.ly traffic source 🙂 One link created with Bit.ly might have several lives, in fact 🙂

Lately there’s been a lot of discussion of the relevance of referrers as a way of discovering the source of traffic to a site. At bitly, we see billions of clicks per month on across multiple platforms, instant messages, emails and mobile text messages. This gives us a unique window onto the way people share social objects, and we see how they propagate through human networks and across the various social networks.

via bitly blog – Where does your traffic really come from?.

twitter-trucs-infographie.jpg Image JPEG, 595×7196 pixels.

Now you don’t have any more excuses for not starting your twitter account.

It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is eavesdropping on your social networks—so that when you share content you’ll get maximum exposure. Use the following data to learn when your audience is most likely to tune in. Be sure to check in with us next week when we discuss timing & email marketing.

via The Science of Social Timing Part 1: Facebook and Twitter Social Networks.

Men and women are different. You know that. But do they tweet differently? Tweetolife is a simple application that lets you compare and contrast what men and women tweet about. Simply type in a search term or phrase and compare. For example, search for love, and 63 percent of tweets that contain that word were from women, based on the sample data collected between November 2009 and February 2010.

via Gender and time comparisons on Twitter.

PR professionals have continued to embrace Twitter.

In 2011, 76 percent of communicators in the United States and Canada used the site, nearly double the percentage from 2009, according to the Social Media Reality Check, a study by CNW and Leger Marketing.

At the same time, the percentage of consumers using Twitter continues to lag that of PR pros. The study said 32 percent of consumers belong to the site, quadruple the percentage from 2009, when CNW and Leger released its first Social Media Reality Check.

The purpose of the study is to explore professional communicators’ use of social media compared with consumer opinions on its influence over their shopping habits.

via Study: 76 percent of communications professionals use Twitter | Articles.

Discover what’s happening right now in the world of journalism

via Journalists on Twitter – Breaking News, Politics, Opinion and more – Muck Rack.

No journalist can afford to ignore social media and it would appear that few do nowadays, according to the latest annual digital journalism study by the Oriella PR network.

Its researchers discovered that social media is being used more and more in newsrooms as both a newsgathering tool and for verification.

via Twitter is essential for journalists – but they still rely on the PR machine | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Twitter has rolled out a dashboard that lets marketers access data about their followers. It shows how a brand’s followers have increased over time, breaks down their gender and location, displays what interests they have shown, illustrates how engaged they are, and details what kinds of Twitter users they follow.

via Twitter Debuts ‘Follower Dashboard,’ Opens Geotargeting Spigot | ClickZ.