Blog Tips
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Using Twitter to increase quality traffic on your blog Posted:
Here is a small case study on how you can
use Twitter as a social networking tool to “create” a new loyal public for
your blog. I started my own Twitter account back about six months ago,
as an experiment. Sure, I heard about Twitter, as a micro-blogging platform,
limiting any update to 140 characters of text, but did not really feel the
immediate use for me, as a blogger. I understood even less how it could help
me to drive traffic to my blog until I really started using it. I -uneasily- posted my first updates like
“It is a lovely day in Getting regular feedback from my
Twitter-followers, I “upgraded” my Tweets from the “Traffic is a bum in Low and behold, after my slow Twitter-start,
people started to follow me back and in a couple of months, I had a group of
followers of 100 people. This TwitterCounter graph of my
follower-count clearly shows the tipping point came in February, at about 100
followers: from then on I did not have to look for like-minded followers
anymore, they found me!
As I made it a habit to also Tweet a link to
any new blogpost I published on my personal blog, I could
see - much to my surprise - an impact on the traffic on my blog. Google Analytics shows something like 30
people/week coming in from Twitter with a referral peak during the period my
Twitter tipping point occurred:
You might think “Hmm 30 new visitors per
week is not really all that impressive”, but Analytics can only track
referral traffic from Twitter when people use Twitter’s website to read
updates. The majority of Twitter-ers use one or the other desktop interface
like Twhirl,
which Analytics does not track as Twitter being the referral site. So it is
not difficult to imagine my own Tweets with links to new blogposts generate
anything between 100 to 150 visits per week. Now, we are talking! Comparing the figures of my “new visitors”
on my blog from before and after “my Twitter tipping point” confirms the
impact of Twitter on my blog traffic: my new visitor count increased from 64%
to 83%, indicating a whole new heap of people discovered my blog for the
first time. And to top it off: new visitors stayed twice
as long on my blog, showing new visitors were more interested in what I
wrote. This is the social networking force of Twitter at it best: as these
Twitter followers and I have common interests (otherwise they would not
follow me on Twitter), they were obviously also interested in what I wrote on
my blog. I had used - be it by coincidence rather than by intent - Twitter,
to create a new public for my blog. My advise for
non-profit organisations with a blog: start a Twitter blog and create your
own audience of followers, and inbetween your regular Tweets, also post your
blog (or website) updates. This will guarantee a traffic increase of people
truly interested in what you blog about, which is the quality traffic we -
serious bloggers - see as our most precious public. And to make it the circule complete: why not
publish your Twitter updates on your blog? This will increase your amount of
quality Twitter followers.
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Does your organisation have a blog? Posted:
20% answered their organisation did not have
a blog. About half of the respondents indicated their organisation had one or
more blogs, which were not officially endorsed. The main lesson we learned out of the poll
is that 70% indicated their non-profit organisation did not use blogs as an
official way to communicate to their public. A proof of the fact there is
still quite a way to go to have the non-profit sector embrace blogging.
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