Twitter and Retail: No Traction Yet?

Hitwise UK’s Robin Goad says that Twitter is driving lots of traffic to news sites but not (so far) to retailers:

Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect. However, with one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which claims to generated $3m via Twitter), very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. During May, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter.

In contrast to that bit (courtesy of Matt McGee) here’s a new site CheapTweet that seeks to aggregate and publicize retailer deals on Twitter with a Digg-like presentation:

Coupons, sales and deals will be a central reason for following among many consumers in the future I predict.

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Related: ShopLocal is doing some interesting things with its retailers and Twitter (and viral promotion). Also see this Bloomberg article on B2B fees for corporate marketer-users on Twitter.

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