The Philadelphia Enquirer pulled its “audience team”, off of twitter and replaced them with an automated bot.
It turned out that there was no change in referral traffic:
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s audience team used to spend 80% of its time on Twitter for a 2-3% return in referral traffic.
“And I was like, well that’s ridiculous,” said Kim Fox, managing editor for audience and innovation.
Now, the Inquirer’s Twitter flagship accounts are automated, and the Inquirer gets … yes … about a 2-3% return in referral traffic. ………
This wan’t a heavy duty AI bot. It’s basically an RSS feed.
I am not surprised.
It’s the nature of the medium.