Skittles Gets a Huge Spike, But Will It Last?

Like everyone else, I covered the Skittles.com overhaul last month, writing the column Why Skittles Killed Its Website. One line in the column sums it all up:

Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

Now, Compete’s blog checks out the traffic before, during and after. Compete writes:

The skittles.com site was replaced with a live Twitter feed, with any tweet mentioning the word “Skittles” appearing on the page. Huge media buzzed around the strategy, and as a result, traffic to the site surged by an astonishing 2072%, attracting 441,855 people in March.

 

There’s still some lift, and it may work out well for Skittles over the long haul, especially if it helps its Facebook presence.

Note that the number of Facebook fans of Skittles only went up incrementally after the early March overhaul. Just recently, the growth started to pick up. Right now AllFacebook says Skittles ranks #307 among Facebook Pages, andwe’ll see if the recent surge pulls it even higher.

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The surge in visitors to Skittles brings to mind a 2007 post from Jeremiah Owyang on the traffic he received after a story got a major boost on digg. Note the spike and the small but noticeable uptick after.