I have been delving into how effective Twitter is for online websites for the past month or so. I’ve learned a lot about using it to build relationships and post content, but to tell you the truth, I was pretty skeptical at first about whether it was worth the effort or not.
Turns out that Twitter really can help you grow your business and I have proof!
A couple of weeks ago, I started a new twitter account for a hobby site in the pet niche that I have. I tweeted a few informational tweets, linked to some of my articles and then I searched twitter for other Tweeters in the niche. I found a few and followed them and some of their followers.
A few hours later, I had a few people follow me back, but here’s the really cool part – one of the people I had followed has a forum in the niche and he grabbed one of my articles and posted it on the forum with a link back to my site! Of course he tweeted me to let me know and also commented on my blog.
How cool is that? Instant article syndication on a related site! I don’t know if you have tried to find niche related sites to syndicate your articles to but it can be a tedious and boring task, so I was amazed that I got one syndicated all because of a couple of 140 character tweets!
Another of my Twitter accounts is the one associated with my IM business (@leedobbins). I’ve had that one for a while but I wasn’t really active on Twitter other than to blast out tweets about the latest thing I had for sale.
When I started researching Twitter, I decided to become more active and really try to connect with people and get good followers. I really did all the things I talk about in my Twitter Book
I started to monitor my Twitter account a couple times a day – posting good stuff, retweeting interesting posts and trying to reply to people (at first this was actually kind of scary, it felt weird to reply to someone that I didn’t know!). I used Hootsuite to manage my account and make it all easier just like I show in this video.
At first, I didn’t get much “action” and I have to admit that after a few weeks I did kind of slack off and only posted sporadically and maybe not even every day.
But then, a funny thing happened, I noticed that people started to retweet my stuff (thanks guys, I know some of those retweets were from you!!) AND people were starting to mention me. Now, of course, this is kind of an ego boost, but I can see where this can eventually also boost my bottom line. Enough people mentioning and retweeting me means more followers and more followers could eventually lead to more sales.
So, the bottom line is that Twitter is working for me and it can work for you too but you will have to give it some time (My niche site paid off right away but my other one took a good month before action started to kick in).
You have to make a commitment to use it daily though, it’s not something that you can totally automate I don’t think because you need to keep the human element in there to gain interest and a following but you can make the whole thing quicker and easier with tools.
Also, you need to develop what I call a “Twitter mindset” and that is to always be looking for good stuff to tweet. When you are surfing around the web, if you find something that would be of interest to your followers tweet the link! A lot of sites now have social sharing buttons on their posts that make it easy peasy, all you do is click and press “Tweet” so there really is no reason to not be tweeting this stuff.
It only makes sense that the Search Engines are going to depend more and more on these types of social signals in their ranking algorithms so it would be smart to start incorporating Twitter into your website promotion plan as soon as you can. Not only that, but it will help lessen your dependence on the search engines because you will actually be getting traffic from twitter (my stats show 12 visits from twitter this month – not earth shattering but its early days yet!).
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