The Life and Times of A Twitter Link
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?
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.
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.- 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. - 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. - 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.
Share this article
Search
Subscribe!
Recent Entries
- Google Analytics' Game-Changing Features
- Climate Change: A Family Affair ~ Blog Action Day, 2009
- Freshen Up Your Site
- Blog Action Day - 2009
- The Power of the CMS
- The Results Are In: Where Marketers are Spending $$ in a Down Economy
- smart(TM) Commuting, Smart Computing
- Interactive Marketers Need The Bing Worse Than Tony Soprano
- Boost Your Site's Success By Multiplying User Sessions by 3!
- What the heck is Twitter and how do I use it?
- New PPC ROI Calculator
- Sure, you can buy the data... But can you analyze it?
- To Append or Not to Append?
- Restaurant Web Design, PPC, SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing and More
- Five Surefire Ways to Control Scope Creep
- Fuel Interactive Announces Retro-Optimization to Drive Client Business in the Web 1.5 World
- Following Cassey into Fuel Interactive...
- The Life and Times of A Twitter Link
- How to Maximize Your ROI with Conversion Optimization: A Case Study
- New Pay Per Click Articles on Search Engine Journal
- 8 Ways Clients Can Help Their PPC Agency Succeed
- ENOUGH with the Popcorn Already!!
- Hotel Boosts Revenue 40% With Private Social Network
- Improve Your Site Traffic by 2,900% Through the Power of Social Marketing
- New Pay Per Click Advertising Articles
- No, Google Is Right: Bounces Are People Too
- Personality is Key in Social Media
- Pubcon 2008: Social Media Trifecta
- 5 Steps to PPC Optimization: Brian Carter's Scary SEO Presentation
- "Toys R Us" Toying with the Social Networking Scene
- Superadvanced Google Analytics Reporting for AdWords
- A/B Testing: How Much Data Do You Need?
- Spleling Iz Importent
- Google Optimizing Their Optimizer?
- 5 SUPERDUMB Mistakes with AdWords Keywords
- SEO Is Not For Rankings, Traffic Or Conversions
- Job Opening! SEO/PPC/Social Media Specialist
- Outrageous Minimum Bids: New AdWords Quality Score in Action
- 5 Reasons Why Email Marketing is A Lot Like College Football
- Google AdWords Interview on the New Quality Score Changes
- The 7 Essential Talents of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee
- 10 Reasons Why SEO Can't Help Obama
- SEO, PPC, Social Media: An Easy Way to Keep Up with the News
- Woman on the Street Interview: Twitter, RSS, Blogs, and Logs
- The Dirty Part of Web Analytics
- 5 Powerful Local Search Marketing Tactics: My SMX Local 2008 Presentation
- Email Marketing Proofs for Dummies: The 7-Step solution
- SEO Women: Sumo Wrestling Fight on Baseball Field
- Social Networking & Web 2.0 for Professional Associations
- Search Marketing Business: Are You Losing Your Shirt Because You're Wearing the Wrong Shirt?
- AdWords 911: The 4 Step Emergency Fix for Dying AdWords Accounts
- The Ten Commandments of SEM 2.0
- Google Local Search SEO (Blended Search): Optimizing Universal Search Results for Local Businesses
- The SEM 2.0 Pyramid (SEO + SMO + PPC)
- 10 Tips for PR 2.0 and a Sexier Press Release
- Shame on You: Twitter CAN be a Sales Tool
- Online Reputation Management: Twitter, Summize, & iGoogle
- Is SEO Spam? What Search Rankings Do You Deserve?
- 7 Easy SEO Tips for Bloggers Who Are Allergic to HTML
- Josh Williams
- The Killer Trifecta: Twitter + Blog + Social Bookmarking
- 8 Tips for Power Networking on Twitter
- The Problem with Long Tail Keywords
- Maximum ROI with Third-Party Email Lists
- 13 Twitterers Confess Why They Unfollow
- Why and How to Do Social Media @ CreateSouth
- 14 Ways To Get Unfollowed on Twitter
- Warn Google! TwitterSpam Memes Could Game Search Rankings
- 6 Steps to TwitterFame, or at least Twitteriety
- Does Web 2.0 Really Merit Different Metrics from Advertising?
- 8 Steps to Keeping SEO Clients by Getting the Results That Matter to Them
- 11 Coolest Google/Twitter Combo Gadgets and Devices
- Crucial: Google Local Search Results
- Endless Fun PPC Advertising Case Study
- Online Press Release Attachments: Word Doc vs. PDF
- Why Pay-Per-Click is the Perfect Advertising Tactic in Uncertain Financial Times
- Are You Googleable? Increase Your Findability
- SEO/PPC Success Measures and KPI's
- How Pay Per Click Is Different From Traditional Media Spending
- Top 5 Reasons Not to do Post-Pay Billing AdWords in an Agency Setting
- What makes a developer great?
- Choose Your Words Carefully: Who Are You Writing For?
- Interactive Planning
- Mobile Marketing - Not Just For the Sake Thereof
- SEO Hot Topics & Sources For More Info
- Ten Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings

Leave a comment