Easy promotion and traffic

Once a blogger has formed a network on twitter that is interested in the same topics that he writes about, then you got the perfect channel to promote your writings. If I take myself for example I follow (and get followed by) people interested in Social Media, Business and Design. This way of communicating directly to your niche, might explain the high click through rates on twitter. I once tested how many people would click a link in an ordinary messages using bit.ly, that offers detailed statistics on the clicks you get. It turned out that of the 100 followers I had 6 clicked the link within 10 minutes of each other.

Time value of your tweet

Analyzing the clicks with bit.ly showed that the traffic you get from tweeting a link are within a time span of 10 minutes, so the value of your message is of limited time. This is because of the way the main twitter feed works. The feed is real time, and messages that are old are not likely to be viewed by any followers.

Twitter value strategies

So how can bloggers promote their posts and try to get the most time value, without really annoying anyone? You could promote your link each hour, but many followers would get annoyed and in the long run you would loose followers and thus value.

I experimented with different strategies. Simply tweeting a link asking in the message if someone could please ReTweet, did not give much results. Though this seems to be what most people do. Probably if you have a more popular blog or authority on twitter you get ReTweets more easily, but you are still faced with the time value problem. I noticed when Chris Brogan once ReTweeted one of my messages. Within 10 minutes I noticed about 10 ReTweets appearing in my stream, but after this short timespan the conversation ended.

Then I tried to start a ‘Cafe shaped conversation‘, which Chris Brogan presents as the way for brands to communicate online. It turned out to be very successful. By engaging in a conversation about the blogpost with people they receive this message in their @reply stream, greatly extending the time value of my message. Then the conversation spreaded to others that were mentioned in my blogpost and it resulted in getting twitter traffic for 3 days.

The image shows my analysis of traffic, using wp-stats and bit.ly, when applying the twitter conversation strategy.

Conclusion: Twitter conversation strategy (keep the conversation going)

Twitter is a great way to promote your blog or website, but value is limited by its  short time value your message recieves. By engaging in conversations and useing @replys you can prevent the conversation from ending, resulting in a longer time value. This case analysis seems to prove that ‘Cafe shaped conversations” Chris Brogan speaks about, are indeed a usefully strategy to communicate online. Now please keep note that just @replying to anyone could be annoying and will probably not give you any long term results. I guess the same rules apply as in any real cafe conversation. What are your experience?

Related posts:

1. The future of web 3.0: Personal profiles as data filter.