The Life and Times of A Twitter Link

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Twitter is a fast moving world and what you say can easily be missed by your loyal followers.  But just how fast moving are your followers’ twitter streams?  Thanks to the URL shortening service bit.ly we now know the answer is just a brief five minutes.

We asked the author of @thewholeworld, who has about 2,500 followers, to run a series of three tests promoting various funny videos or articles.  What we found was surprising; nearly all traffic to those links was within five minutes of the tweet.  After that… nothing.

The three adjacent graphs show the 30 minutes following a tweet and the activity generated from the link.  What this illustrates is that while a tweet lasts forever in search.twitter.com, it only lasts for a few moments in the eyes of 99% of your followers.  If you have a follower who is not watching their twitter stream when you tweet, your message falls on def ears since you're likely going to be off of their 1st page.

So, based on this, how effective is twitter at spreading the word and what can you do to make the most of the technology?

1. Its not mass market communication.
   If you're tweeting with the expectation that the world is listening, you're wrong.  Only a handful of your followers who are online right then know what you've just said.
2. Join the discussion. 
   This proves that a simple one way broadcast can easily get overlooked by your followers.  It's a far better strategy to join the conversation and talk with those you're following (and likely vice versa) than to just stand up and shout. 
3. Tweet, & tweet often. 
   There's an old advertising adage that goes, "you market to a parade, not a standing army."  Nowhere is this truer than in the twitterverse.  If you're not constantly communicating and spreading your brand, you're missing out.  That great message you just tweeted, won't be seen five minutes from now.
4. It's a relationship, not just a sale.
   Twitter is all about relationships and being an active part of the community.  If you're hoping to just jump in and tweet every now and then, you're not building a relationship and missing the most valuable part of Twitter.  Yes, there's money to be found and made on Twitter, but it's not in the traditional fashion.  Before you can expect to cash in, you've got to build the relationship with your followers.
5. You can probably promote an amazing deal. 
   If only a fraction of your audience will ever see that last tweet, you can feel relatively safe to experiment with some pretty great deals.  Let's say you're a hotel, try to promote a 5 minute deal to your followers for a 5 dollar room.  Anyone who calls or books in within five minutes through a unique URL would get an incredible deal.  Anyone who didn't will wish they'd been following you or paying more attention.  The result.  You get great word of mouth, likely new consumers and build a great relationship with your followers.

The moral of the story is that twitter is like any social event you've ever attended.  You can't expect the person you've just met to know what you told someone in a previous conversation.  So get involved, have fun and make connections with your consumers.