Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter

I used to promote my blog posts on Twitter, then when I left Twitter, noticed a significant loss in traffic. Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, being on a Twitter hiatus gives a unique opportunity to try out some experiments.

By the numbers:
Here’s the stats from the experiment: In the last 24 hours, 199 folks tweeted these words “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” within 24 hours.

Although not all of them used the snipurl I created, there were 2,000 clicks and unique clicks 1,280. This means that the average tweet that linked to the post generated 10 clicks, and about 6.4 unique clicks per person.

There were 145 new followers to my twitter account, the daily average is new daily followers 88. This is a lift in follower increase of 60% beyond the daily average.

Google Web Analytics showed that to be the top viewed page in last 24 hours, with 954 views, the graph below indicates that traffic returned to patterns before I took my Twitter hiatus.

Above Graph: Last 30 days visitors according to Google Analytics to my blog, notice the dip when I started the hiatus on Jan 20th, also coupled by the holidays. On Dec 5th the twitter experiment started and brought visitors back up to normal levels.

Above Graph: Twitter was the top referrer of traffic over the last 24 hours.

This means that:

My experiment on ‘energizing’ (word of mouth) was successful from blog to twitter, learn about my goals.

You don’t need to be on Twitter.com as an active user to gain traffic to your site.

Since my twitter account wasn’t involved, the number of Twitter followers doesn’t matter as much as we once thought.

If you have compelling content, and make it easy for people to share, they will, and then it will rapidly spread through the twitter WOM network.

While I do have a good sized blog readership, a marketer with advertising budget could easily generate eyeballs to a blog with less subscribers, and potentially get similar results.

If you read the comments, there were several vendors that are going to offer a tweet icon at the bottom of your blog post, or wordpress plugin, so expect to see more of these.

This experiment isn’t completely scientifically done, if this were for an official Forrester report, that I’d have several control groups, sample with a variety of different websites, blogs, and twitter accounts to find a pattern. The one conclusion is that I don’t need to tweet to get twitter traffic.

Helpful? Copy, Paste, then Tweet it!

Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter http://snipurl.com/9k5xy