Ever feel like you’re spending all your time on Twitter but most people are not reading your tweets?
Well…
The reality is that most people are not reading your tweets…!
But… that doesn’t mean that you can’t increase the number of people who do see them.
In this article, I’m going to show you how we increased traffic from Twitter to our website by 106% in less than 30 days.
Yes, we more than doubled our traffic from our Twitter account!
1. We analyzed our account
You may have seen our ultimate guide to Twitter analytics recently, where we shared how you can analyze your Twitter account. If you did, you will remember this image!
Before you start, you need to analyze your account for the things that are relevant to you in the chart above.
How many people are your tweets reaching? What demographics do your audience fit into? How effective are the hashtags you are using?
What you don’t measure, you can’t improve!
It’s important to have a baseline of how things are so that you can measure the impact of any changes you make.
2. We got more followers
It makes sense that, if you get more relevant followers, you have a chance to get more traffic.
Relevant is the most important word.
If they are not relevant, they are a waste of time. Having a high number of followers who have no interest in your industry or your brand will do you no favors at all!
I’ve been testing out Social Quant for the last couple of weeks, which identifies relevant people to follow.
These tools are not always great but this one is really find good people to follow. You know it’s working when you are getting lots of opportunities to engage with new followers who then tweet you to thank you for the follow.
They are not passive Twitter users, they are happy to engage right from the start… which is encouraging when it comes to future engagement with your tweets.
3. We started on Blab… hang on a minute, what’s that?
Blab is like Google Hangouts, except it works…
You can have video conversations of up to four people at the same time, broadcasting live.
While that is happening, there is a stream of conversation happening from the people who are watching your blab.
Blab is very much connected to Twitter. When someone is promoting the show, it’s shared out on Twitter. When people are sharing information when the show is on, they usually share it on Twitter.
This increased activity on your Twitter account results in more engagement, more followers and more traffic.
4. We improved the content we shared
A couple of months ago, I looked at our Twitter accounts and wondered why so many tweets didn’t have images.
The tool we were using wasn’t automatically picking up the images.
Yes…
Tweets with images get more retweets.
D’oh…!
If you look at our account now, you’ll see there are images with 90% of the tweets. We typically create images for our posts using Canva. Here’s an example:
Tweets with images are more likely to stand out on a crowded timeline, they look more attractive, and they are eye catching. Could you add more images to your tweets?
5. We shared more content
As we were still getting good engagement, we started scheduling more content.
Tweets disappear very quickly from users’ timelines, so the likelihood is that most people don’t see your content.
How many people are on Twitter for more than an hour a day? Not many. And even those who are don’t see every tweet that passes through their stream.
So… if you share content every hour, the same people don’t see your content.
You can usually tweet this frequently without worrying about overwhelming your followers. It can be a really effective way of improving your visibility on the channel.
We don’t share all of our content but we are sharing more of other people’s – and our own – and this is getting us more traffic!
What’s next?
We can all be smarter about how we share our content.
If we repeat-share our content (which we advise doing), we should vary the message and image for each post.
For example…
It’s often better to pick out an interesting quote in an article than to share the article title (unless it’s controversial or particularly compelling).
And it’s better to share an image that captures attention… we’re going to start sharing some animated gifs to capture attention.
This way, you can share the same post in a number of different ways: with different text, or different images. It is not repetitive, and keeps variety in your Twitter stream while promoting the same content
