One Week Twitter Traffic Experiment Results

It had officially been a week since I started my Twitter traffic experiment, and now it is time for the results.

As was previously stated, my Twitter profile has a minimal number of followers.  The results of this experiment must be largely attributed to Twitter search and the use of #hashtags.

The Best Performing Tweets

1. The 5 most important things I have learned about Google PageRank. http://bit.ly/v2G1W #SEO #Blogging    [39 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
2. 3 Easy Steps to Make Your Google XML Sitemap Auto-Discoverable http://bit.ly/17g73y #SEO #Google        [33 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
3. One Week Twitter Traffic Experiment http://bit.ly/6Lpek #twitter #blogging #seo   [32 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
4. Bit.ly Review – Don’t tell my wife, but I am in love! http://bit.ly/18A2H8 #bitly #wa #twitter  [27 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
5. 4 Easy Steps To Install Your Own Favicon http://bit.ly/12Js4U #SEO #Webdesign  [19 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
6. How I plan to control my vanity search http://bit.ly/ISsE1 #SEO  [18 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
7. 5 Reasons To Consistently Create Unique Content http://bit.ly/jrz2C #blogging  [17 Clickthroughs as the result of 2 tweets generated by me]
8. New Post: How to start publishing board games http://bit.ly/DZL0b #games #boardgames #cardgames [15 Clickthroughs as the result of 1 tweet generated by me]
9. 3 Simple Steps To Track Shortened URL Clickthrough Rates http://bit.ly/f6p3S #twitter #wa #blogging  [6 Clickthroughs as the result of 1 tweet generated by me]
10. Are You Ping Spamming? WordPress Plugin Review – MBP Ping Optimizer http://bit.ly/r60V8 #wordpress  [4 Clickthroughs as the result of 1 tweet generated by me]

The timing of clickthroughs as well as total performance on Twitter led to some interesting conclusions.  The most important conclusion being that Twitter is a good platform for promoting your own blog content.  While I read a lot about social traffic being inferior to link based traffic, I will still take the traffic where I can get it.  Twitter traffic is better than traffic that comes from StumbleUpon, because people know the headline from the post they are going to.  There is also an assumption of spam on Twitter.  The result of the spam expectation is that when somebody actually gets what the click for, they are more likely to stay and read more.  Staying and reading more is especially true if the post you are tweeting is optimized with 3-5 links to other internal content.

What I learned about #Hashtags

Hashtags are the way that Tweeple add meta-data or tags to their tweets.  If I add the hashtag #seo or #google, then people will know that the post pertains to thos topics and hopefully adds value to the knowledge base and discussion.  Tweeple also search for various #hashtags, click on hashtags from other tweets, and can go as far as subscribing to RSS feeds for various hashtags.  The resulting eyeballs on the various #hashtags means that popular terms such as #seo, #google, and #twitter will have short lifespans of viewability.  There are too many tweets about them for the tags to last.  Whenever I tagged a tweet with #seo or #google I typically got 14 or so clicks within a couple of minutes for good headlines.

However, whenever I used a #hashtag that was less popular, I got a similar number of clickthroughs, but over a longer period of time.  The best example being my #8 performing tweet with the tags #games, #boardgames, and #cardgames.  On a per tweet basis this was my #4 performer.  If you could combine the quick clicks of popular hashtags like #twitter with the longevity of a hashtag like #boardgames, you have a recipe for success.  Every time you get a retweet you will get the high performance of the #twitter tag, while still getting the longevity of the #boardgame tag (which will hopefully allow for retweets that are spaced out from each other).

Based on my Clicky Web Analytics I know the following for the last 7 days

First, I need to give a quick shout out to how good the Clicky Web Analytics is.  It is incredibly intuitive to read, real-time, and it has a no obligation free premium trial.  Their free service tracks up to 3,000 page views a day.  For the last 7 days my best traffic sources in terms of total incoming traffic was:

1. Twitter
2. StumbleUpon (I submitted some of my pages to StumbleUpon prior to the experiment)
3. BGDF.com
4. toysngames.ning.com
5. Family blog that my wife runs

For those top five referers, the most total time spent on the site ranks as follows:

1. Twitter
2. toysngames.ning.com
3. BGDF.com
4. Family blog
5. StumbleUpon  (an embarrassing 5 minutes 36 seconds was tracked and one visitor spent 1 minute 51 seconds onsite)

The refferers that had the best time per referral are:

1. BGDF.com
2. toysngames.ning.com
3. Twitter
4. Family blog
5. StumblUpon

The ning social network and BGDF.com are both highly related forums / social networks to board game design, development, and publishing.  My post “How I Started Publishing Board Games” was a big draw for this group.  Especially considering that I am currently in the process of bringing my first board games to market and I have been lightly involved in the Board Games Designer’s Forum.

The Conclusion

Traffic from Twitter is nice and can kickstart your blog from ground zero, especially if you can get a power-user to retweet or tweet about one of your posts.  Twitter produced the most time spent on my blog from the beginning of this experiment, which is the most important metric for me.  The Twitter traffic is however short lived, all of my tweets have been forgotten.  Capture the Twitter traffic while you can and turn them into loyal readers.

Over a longer period of time, the links from related blogs, forums, and social networks will bring a higher quality of users than Twitter.  Over the long run this will be more important, because these users will comment, refer, retweet, link, and support your site.  Work on developing the potential for long-term traffic, but do not ignore the potential for extra exposure as a result of Twitter.

My subscribers went from 4 to 5 over this time period.  Nothing impressive.  Additionally, my Twitter followers changed from the 60-70 area to 103.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Traffic Experiment
2. Bit.ly Review – 5 Reasons I Use This URL Shortener
3. How To Get StumbleUpon Traffic
4. StumbleUpon Results – Should You Buy Web Traffic?
5. 3 Steps To Start Tracking Shortened URL Clickthroughs