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How Twitter Has Worked For Me

On December 20, I posted about how I was going to change my use of Twitter from just using it for communication to as a tool for marketing as well. The fundamental change I made was following everyone who followed me, and actively going out and following other people who might be interested in travel.

It has now been four months since I made the change to how I approach Twitter and I figure it is a good time to go back and look at how successful it has been.

Twitter Follower Growth

In addition to the changes noted above, I also invested $50 in a very nice looking Twitter background image. This has made a huge difference. The moment someone checks out my Twitter page, they know what I am about, even if they just scan the page. Here is how my follower list has expanded since December:

You can see I have gone from about 2,000 followers to 45,000 followers at the time of this writing. My marketing strategy is focused around serendipity. If people have a chance to accidentally discover me, I am pretty good at converting them. The trick is the initial introduction. Twitter is really good at this and I see the results of it every day. I think my success at growing my follower base is due to the compelling nature of what I’m doing, and the fact that I spend most of my time on Twitter answering questions and just engaging in chit chat with people about the places I visit. Most of twitter marketing is just BSing with people. It is really not hard.

Blog Traffic

I have gone from about 100 visits per week from the Twitter.com domain to about 900. This only reflects visits which come from the Twitter website, not people who use third party clients. This probably would at least double the amount of actual traffic I get.

I have also found that the number of clicks you get on a URL you put on Twitter is dependent on the number of times you display the URL. Most people seem to only look at traffic which appears when they are online. I’d very much like a WordPress plugin that will put a URL on Twitter X times every Y hours. I think once every 6 or 4 hours would be idea and most people wouldn’t get the sense that you are spamming the same URL. Most people wouldn’t even see the other mentions of the link.

Subscribers

My subscribers have increased dramatically over the past 4 months. I crossed the 1,000 mark on January 1 and as of today I am at 1813. That is an 80% increase. I can only indirectly point this to Twitter. It mostly has come from my site redesign and the launch of my email newsletter, but Twitter has played a big role.

Lessons
I don’t know if my experience applies to everyone. As I stated in my previous post on advice bloggers, everyone is going to have to apply lessons differently. Twitter has proven to be a great tool for people to discover you. If you have a more targeted blog, my approach probably wont be as successful.

By Gary

3 dimples. 7 continents. 130 countries.

3 replies on “How Twitter Has Worked For Me”

Try twitterfeed.com for sending your latest blogs posts multiple times. I thought the same and send new posts within 30 minutes and also at 6 hrs and 12 hrs to cover the time zone. Just change the “pre text” and it wont come across as spam.

I’ve been using twitterfeed for awhile and I have never seen that feature.

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