Twitter Experiment - Stage One Complete

Over the past couple weeks, I've been working on an experiment with Twitter - what does it take to get some level of hits to a site from Tweets?

The ingredients:

• One domain - registered about a month ago
• First blog post was done Oct. 24th
• One inbound link that contributed less than 10 hits
• Targeted posts on a single topic area
• Two Twitter accounts
• A willingness to just give it a shot

The Goal - simply to see if Tweets can effectively convert to traffic. Quality of traffic to be established later as part of determining if this is worth the effort. Partial other goal is to grow followers on my second Twitter account.

Scientific? Not a chance, but I think a decent process.

So off to Twitter we go. I've got two accounts. One is me as the goofy s4e everybody knows. The other is a niche porn name account that I'm using for this series of niche blogs.

Over the past few weeks, I've been making contact on Twitter with a few of the girls that I planned on featuring in the blog. Just general Tweets, nothing special or specific. Friendly contributions here and there. On occasion, one would respond here and there. When they did, I responded, just keeping it friendly. When I got a blog post ready to go, I tried to make sure it was timed with when I thought I could Tweet it in the direction of the girl it featured. The hope was that they may retweet, sending it out to their followers.

One thing I got lucky with was the timing for Halloween. I had not planned on that aspect, but it for sure worked in my favor. The four primary girls I was attempting to Tweet with, all did special Halloween photo sets and I quickly posted about them. I ended up doing seven posts in three days that were published over four days. The other fortunate part of this was that as part of a Halloween theme, I hit on some keywords that for sure worked in my favor. I used those keywords as a consistent tag for all seven posts.

As each post was published, I used my main account that I had been Tweeting with the girls on to let them know that my 'alter ego' was about to send them a Tweet about a blog post about them. 3 of the 4 readily retweeted my Tweet to their followers. Those three girls have followers totaling just around 14,500

On Friday morning, October 30th, with the posts that were done within the last 24 hours, I was able to get retweets from these three girls out to 14,500 Twitter members. That's taking out a few duplicate retweets from them. If those were included, it would be well into the 25,000+ range.

So what happened...

Pretty much instantly, the site was getting hits. I've only got Wassup on this blog to track stats at the moment, but good enough for this experiment. The site went from nearly zero activity, to a constant 300-500 hits for each 24 hour period that I checked. This lasted through this Monday morning - today. All day today, it's only been around 150-175 each time I've checked the base 24 hour view.

Here's where it starts to get interesting... as expected, there were plenty of hits coming from each of the girls Twitter profiles. What I didn't expect was the hits from FaceBook profiles. The Tweets basically went a short form of viral for a couple days. It would also appear that my Halloween oriented tag got a few static links around the world. That doesn't suck!

As all this was going on, I was checking my click through stats just as often. The three girls are from three different programs and there was a consistent click through for each of them. I didn't do any real math on the click throughs, but I'm thinking they were in the 2-3% range for hits to the pages. Now, that was to those specific programs for the three girls. ALL of the other programs with banners and the couple other posts on the site received clicks, so the overall CTR was actually much higher - more like 10+%.

Overall, I'd call the experiment a success - it's not all that difficult to get traffic from Tweeting. Quality of traffic is something different. I'll be monitoring conversions over the next couple weeks to see what the impact was. My fear at this point is that the reTweets went out to people who already were fans of the girls, so either were already members or are just fans that won't pull out their wallets anyway.

Minor goal for more followers for my second account went ok. That went from zero real followers to 15 in the same time period. One thing I've seen is that followers beget followers, so another acceptable success.

Overall, I got lucky with timing and hitting a good Halloween keyword phrase. Past that, the only thing I think I did was what it seems a LOT of people neglect on things like Twitter - they are not SOCIAL while using SOCIAL MEDIA. Get out there people! Put yourself out there! You never know who will respond.

I can see this as something I will continue to experiment with over the next several months as I release new blogs. One of the girls is very nice and understands the value of being social. She's going to be the featured content for the next blog that's about 50% there right now.

So from here, I'm almost torn on where to go with the domain. I had planned on starting link building in the next week, but I'm almost wanting to leave it as an experiment to see what would happen if I only advertise this one on Twitter and other social sites. Decision yet to be made there and I'd be happy to take input.

BIG THANKS goes out to the girls that truly made this possible by reTweeting for me!

Next part of the experiment is tracking conversions to try and determine what value this may have in the big picture. Other part is to work with hashmarks to see if with that level of reTweets, any of them could end up as a trending topic for even a brief moment in time.

For those of you who may not be using your Twitter accounts, you might want to give it a go to see what happens.