How to make Twitter work for your blog in 3 easy steps
I previously published a post on how to increase quality traffic on your blog using Twitter.
Here is a second simple case study on how Twitter can complement your blog and increase interest for your cause and traffic to your blog.
In October 2008, I started several pain vanilla blogs on Tumblr, a simple and straightforward blog platform. I will use two of them in this short case study: AidNews.org and ChangeThru.Info. As they are so similar in setup and layout, I call them “my twin sites”.
Both blogs re-publish summaries of articles from interesting sites I handpicked, each time including a link to the original article. I described this technique in my post RSS Reversed – From Feed to Blog.
I was quite enthusiastic about the setup and the contents of both blogs, and used it quite often as an information aggregator at work. I followed all the usual “need-to-do” to ensure the world knows these blogs exist: I submitted them to blog directories and search engines, and referred regularly to them on my main blog.
Yet, the traffic was not picking up. After nine months, each of the twin sites had about 20 visits per day. As as blogger, you know the feeling: you have something which is really worth reading -according to you- (or worth using as a tool, in case of these blogs) and yet, people don’t seem to pick up these pearls. I felt a bit frustrated.
As I discovered the power of Twitter to create a social community and drive traffic to my main blog, I thought to put my own ideas to the test.
An extra challenge in this case was: while for my main blog (and my personal twitter account), I had time to interact with my Twitter followers, I did not have such luxury for the twin blogs. Would it still be possible, to use Twitter -a microblog tool based on interactivity and interaction- to increase traffic to my blogs without investing loads of time in interacting with my Twitter community?
It was! Here is how I did it, in three steps which literally took me one hour:
- I created two new Twitter accounts, one for each blog: one for AidNews and one for ChangeThru.Info.
- With a simple tool called TwitterFeed, I automatically turned new posts published on each blog into Tweets – using the blogs’ RSS feeds. Each tweet has the title of the post, and the link to the post on my blog.
- To “let the world know” of the two new Twitter accounts, I retweeted half a dozen of the tweets each generated on my main Twitter account.
Lo and behold, my Twitter social community picked it up with a snap of the finger. Look how visitors traffic increased on both blogs within days after I start Twittering.
AidNews daily visitors increased from 20 to 200
...and ChangeThruInfo daily visitors went from 10 to 120
A ten fold traffic increase in both cases, all done on May 23rd, 10 pm working with my laptop in the hammock on my back terrace.
What surprised me even more was Twitter’s social networking powers: as more people started to follow both Twitter accounts, and started re-tweeting interesting posts, both Twitter accounts went “viral”. Here is a graph of the Twitter followers on AidNews: from 0 to 187 in two weeks.
In one hour, using existing and free tools, I accomplished with Twitter what I was not able to do in nine months before: not only did I increase the traffic on both blogs by 1,000%, but I also created two new Twitter social communities, interested in my causes, and in my sites.
Follow me
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
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thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.