New stats we’ve just been shown by video measurement company TubeMogul show that Twitter is quickly growing as a top referrer for web video traffic, far outpacing Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Bing.
Further, when it comes to getting users to watch videos, users who discovered a video via Twitter tend to stay around longer, too. In fact, these users will view a video for an average of just over two minutes.
In a quick Twitter poll, we tried to ascertain the reasons for Twitter’s emergence as a video-sharing tool. From what we can tell, people are using Twitter to connect not just to their real-world friends, but also to specific interests. Hence, they’re finding content that’s directly related to those interests, content that is more personally relevant and, for the individual, more watchable. Simply put, for video discovery, Twitter is “more tuned to my tastes,” in the words of one user.
It might also have something to do with the sheer volume of content and the ease of spreading that content around via retweets. One user said most of his video recommendations were via Twitter, and another said he was less likely to tune out a video if multiple friends retweeted it.
However you want to slice it, though, Twitter is a huge referral source for online video. Video blogging pioneer Steve Garfield, who literally wrote the book on web video, told us, “Twitter is my #1 recomendation engine for finding videos.”
Do you tend to find good videos from your Twitter stream? Are they more interesting or more relevant to you than the videos you’d find on Facebook or from random browsing elsewhere online?
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Tags: ONLINE VIDEO, twitter, youtube