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?

Many industry leaders have recognized that Twitter is just the start of a new web 3.0 era. A web that will be more human, real time and in which personal brands will play a major role. Andrew Keen held an inspiring presentation about web 3.0 at The next web 2009 conference in Amsterdam back in April. He beliefs that web 3.0 will have better business models were web 2.0 failed at this. Web 3.0 will be a place of great inequality, where people with more followers (or peers in their network) will have a much stronger personal brand. Khris Loux vision about web3.0 and decentralization of the web also adds to a better understanding of web3.0.

Opportunities and Personal profiles as data filter.

At the start of this new era where the new industry leaders still need to take form, there are great opportunities. Analyzing the developments of technology and the web, allows us to rethink systems. This is how I came up with the concept of using personal brands in a system to filter data.

Imagine the possibilities of using the profiles of your followers and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkdIn and other social networks to filter data. This would be a perfect way to filter high quality information out of the information overflow of data that we receive from the internet. Such a human filtering system would allow you to choose filtering options based on your network. Who’s notes on a certain article you would like to read for example. If nobody in your followers list has any notes, tags, comments on this data you would choose to see the data filtered by someone with the strongest personal brand(most followers) in the category. To achieve this example you would need a system that connects Twitter(for the personal profile, network and followers count) with Wefollow.com(for the categories in which someone is specialized).

This concept could be applied to any kind of data. The filtering of data is already happening with web 2.0 by tagging, commenting and sharing. The addition of web 3.0 would be to bring in personal profiles and brands allowing better filtering systems to be developed. Imagine a search engine which gives you higher quality results by using your social network’s activities to filter it and rank it based on who you choose to give most authority to.

Who will develop the personal brand standard?

Many have written about online profiles. Chris Brogan, Khris Loux and others have suggested a standard that would allow users to control their own profile information container. On which social network site you decide to place it and remove it when you want to leave the site, giving control and property of the online profile back to the users.

So, who would successfully develop and set such a standard? Would it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or maybe MynameisE? This last one might actually surprise us. Currently they focus on sharing social profiles in the real world, but this might change in the future as they announced Khris Loux is joining their board of directors and he seems to share this vision of an open profile standard.

Only time will tell who are going to fill the gaps and form the new industry of web 3.0. One thing I’m sure of: It’s going to be some interesting times!