LeBron James and the Giant Twitter Link [MediaMemo]

What happens when a really popular person posts a Web link on Twitter? They make a lot of traffic! So what happens when LeBron James posts a Web link on Twitter?

He makes a lot of traffic — and that traffic doesn’t go away.

While some of you (all of you?) wait for James’ ESPN non-news conference tonight, here’s some data to chew on, courtesy of bit.ly, the Web link shortening folks, and betaworks, bit.ly’s Web incubator parent.

Betaworks’ Isaac Greenbaum has spent the past day analyzing this bit.ly link – http://bit.ly/apxlxx – that James posted yesterday via Twitter. Here’s what the traffic from that link, which takes you to James’ personal Web site,  looked like in the first hour after he posted it:

The big spike isn’t unusual for a popular bit.ly link. The impressive part, Greenbaum says, is how much traffic the link continued to generate after the first rush. Even now, he says, a day after the posting, the link is generating some 50 clicks a minute. That’s a torrent for a day-old link.

More data:

What’s really interesting here is that while James is big on Twitter, he isn’t that big — he’s just under 320,000 followers for now. That’s in part because he just went on a couple days ago, and in part because he never get the “Suggested User List” nod from Twitter  that generates those crazy 1 million-plus follower numbers.

But most of the people who get on the SUL list eventually figure out that no one really has that many people reading their Tweets — they just have a lot of people following their account. And most of them are aren’t really “following” at all. Big difference.

So Greenbaum’s real takeaway is that all of James’ Twitter followers are really, really interested in what he has to say. Yep! But here’s my prediction, made without the benefit of any analytics at all: People will start becoming a lot less interested in what James has to say in a few hours.

[Image credit: Craig Hatfield]

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Startup News & Technology | LeBron James and the Giant Twitter Link [MediaMemo]