Econsultancy live Twitter feed on homepage

Twitter… some people can’t see the point, some think it’s the next big thing.

We at Econsultancy started taking serious notice when we realised it was the 4 largest referrer of traffic to our site. Now we’ve taken it a step further and thought you might be interested to see our experiment.

Visit the Econsultancy homepage and you’ll see a live feed from Twitter, via their API, showing all mentions of Econsultancy as they come in.

We call it the ‘ears’ of Econsultancy, the ‘voice’ being our Econsultancy Twitter account which you’re welcome to follow.

We're interested in hearing what you think - feel free to tweet your thoughts, or reply to this post.

I'm all for feeds on homepages where core content doesn't change much. Great way to keep a page fresh and a Twitter feed does indicate the amount of buzz you are creating...

But... You <understatement> aren't short of content </understatement> to keep the page fresh.

You are giving the Twitter feed a lot of homepage real estate above the fold on your homepage. Does the value it offers match the amount of space you are giving it?

Scenario:

-- I don't know your company and I enter the site via a deeper page -- found a blog post via my favourite search engine, for instance

-- Impressed by the value of the blog post (you have some very meaty analysis in your blog) I click to the homepage to find out a bit more (the homepage being a traditional place to introduce yourselves).

-- I see a nice succinct introduction and five tweets, four of which are from people at one company, referencing one blog post. "Um. Ok."

-- I might just exit because there isn't enough to grab my attention.

Wouldn't it be better for me to see extracts from five recent blog posts alongside the popular reports? Maybe some recent forum topics also above the fold?

And if the homepage is my point of entry, so I haven't seen the value in an informative deeper page, isn't the need to demonstrate the value you offer more acute.

I would keep the feed as a reflection of Twitter's importance as a referrer and something your audience are obviously using a lot. But I would have it in the left column. Maybe just further down the middle column. This would allow space to offer a broader introduction to the sort of content/value your site offers by extracting from content.

Hope this is helpful