Twitter driving just 1.5% traffic for news organisations: Study

Although micro-blogging site Twitter has been providing fodder for news hunters for years, new research shows that there's been a sharp decline in the news flow to and from news organisations on the website.

The microblogging platform is now responsible for just 1.5% of traffic for a typical news organisation, says the study carried out by the social analytics company Parse.ly.

The median number of tweets per news post comes in at a measly eight, with just three clicks per tweet, and 0.7 retweets for each original tweet, Digital Trends website reported.

The median publisher saw roughly eight tweets per post, three clicks per tweet and 0.7 retweets for each original tweet, it added.

There are certainly some digitally-savvy publishers who are performing better across social media.

"It is not necessarily about the amount of Twitter activity a publication maintains," Parse.ly noted.

Rather, the websites achieving high levels of engagement "are producing interesting and shareable content that appeals to a large number of people."

The top five percent of publishers average 11% of traffic from the site. Organisations like Nieman Lab saw 15% of their traffic come in through Twitter -- mostly because its "audience is made up of digitally savvy journalists".

"Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy," the report said.

"News really does 'start' on Twitter," it added. Even if that's so, though, Twitter doesn't seem to do much to actually disseminate news.