Before I write this post, I must stress that I do actually like Twitter (can you see where this is going?). However, today I have must have been on about 5 different websites that have integrated Twitter and have a huge archive of their Twitter posts (or ‘Tweets’) on their homepage. As such, I had absolutely no idea what the purpose of their site was about until I clicked on through to different pages. The homepage content, which is so important from both a usability and Search Engine Optimisation perspective is now a collection of tweets, general ramblings and in some cases, just garbled messages and API key messages from Twitter.
I can see the benefit of integrating Twitter into a website, but I think it should have a section of it’s own, or at the most be simply part of the blogroll. Having it as the main content of the homepage may confuse many visitors or simply turn them away from the page which will increase bounce rate and lower the site conversions, which seem to heavily out weigh the advantages of constantly updated content.
