Twitter is an awesome networking tool. I find it the easiest for follow-ups, quick touch-base messages and relationship building. But how easy is it to build traffic with Twitter?
It appears it’s not that easy! I don’t get too many clicks even on Tweets that got tons of engagement.
💡 Before we dive into the topic, please read: How to build traffic with MyBlogU
So how to build traffic from Twitter? We’ve asked our awesome community and we’ll be listing their tips through the month of May. At the end of the month we’ll publish our collection of actionable Twitter traffic building tips.
Agreed, Twitter is a hard place to use to build traffic! #myblogu
— Ken Shenkman (@KenShenkman) May 4, 2017
1. Tag Your URLs
This tip come from @LukaszZelezny:
That is important as otherwise you may not even know how much traffic you receive.
The best way is to use UTM tags: Keep medium as social and source as twitter. Other parameters are up to you.
You can start posting relevant tweets with links whenever you know there is an event and when you know it’s a hashtag.
You can even automate that process with hootsuite or buffer. Observe what hashtags will be popular and when, then prepare CSV file and schedule with hootsuite.
Keep in mind hashtags should be relevant to your content, naturally.
3. Use Viral Content Bee!
Viral Content Bee helps bring your content in front of Twitter users who are eager to discover more relevant content to share. The platform screens all Twitter accounts making sure they are real and have solid following on Twitter.
4. Use URL Shorteners That Bring Clicks to Your Site
If you re-post content from other sources, always add a call-to-action. That way posted content will be working for you delivering some clicks to the website you placed in the call-t- action generated by Snip.ly
It’s really a win-win: You promote other people’s content and you get some clicks too!
Sniply allows us to create a small elegant banner at the bottom of our chosen URLs to curate for tweets. For example, if I were curating a post by another author on “blogging tips”, I would like for people to read this post … but I still want that traffic back to my site. By using Sniply, I can unobtrusively insert a small backlinking banner to my own site, so if I have a post that matches the topic of my curated post, I can tempt people to read my own blog post on the subject as well. The Sniply banner does not obtrude into the page people are reading, but instead stays as a top layer and positions itself near the bottom of the page … but it stays there even as the reader scrolls through the URL.
5. Work on the Quality of Your Twitter Feed and Intereact
More tips from Gill Andrews @StoriesWithGill
I actually get some traffic from Twitter, which is not just luck or coincidence. I do have some single tips that I developed over time, but they are a part of a bigger strategy.
Acting alone won’t get you far on Twitter. You need to make like-minded friends who will become your personal fans and amplify the reach of your content. If someone stumbles over your profile/feed, show your best side:
- Impressive Twitter profile: Professional images and to-the-point bio that although clear also shows your personality
- Impressive Twitter feed.
Make sure your Twitter feed is top-notch quality:
- Curate quality content that is *different* from what everyone’s sharing. Basically, you need to get out of the echo chamber. (To find quality articles on my topics that are different from what others are sharing I often check the articles those popular articles are linking to.)
- Share your posts only if you are sure they are of good quality.
- Share your posts with different images and messages.
- Let your personality show. So many Twitter feeds sound robotic. People find a human voice to be a breeze of fresh air.
Take initiative and interact with real people as much as you can:
- Leave comments on other people’s tweets if you have something to say.
- Retweet with adding your own thoughts to show that you read the article or compliment the author if you were really impressed.
- When you share an article, mention the author, not the website.
- Answer/retweet survey even from people you don’t know. (This and the conversation that happened afterwards got me a loyal fan and subscriber, and an upcoming backlink).
- Come up with some unusual way to get into conversation with your peers and influencers, and make it your thing:
- My “thing” is Business Website Tip of the Day. It’s a custom-made image I post every day with a tip I find (and rephrase) from one of the articles I’ve read. 4 out of 5 articles are not my own, and I always tag the author of that article to draw their attention to it. I tweet a tip of the day twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. These images often get likes and retweets, which makes the word (and most importantly, my name spread). This is how this tip usually looks like:
Analyze and do more of what works:
I now have a feeling what timings and kind of posts work best. So I tweet the posts that are important to me (for example, the posts with lead magnets) strategically.
Analysis is very important. If you are not analyzing the results of your efforts, you are wasting your time. #myblogu
— Gill Andrews (@StoriesWithGill) May 11, 2017
P.S. Just wanted to add: It’s really not about numbers. A person who has 300 followers may do more for your traffic or website in general as the person with 20k followers. It’s about what your relationship with this person is, whether their audience is also your audience, and how engaged their audience is.
On Sunday I do the analysis & scheduling on my own posts: 1h. /2 #myblogu
— Gill Andrews (@StoriesWithGill) May 11, 2017
Just to show you what I’ve achieved so far with this:
- I’ve been on Twitter a bit over 2,5 years, but I started using it for business only since January this year. However, my Twitter authority is currently 54 with every 3d tweet generating some kind of engagement.
- I got to know 2 influencers with whom we now meet once a week on skype to discuss our challenges and to give each other advice. We also share each others content. These two people alone are responsible for at least 30 of my subscribers.
- Someone pinged me because he was impressed with my profile/twitter feed and now regularly refers clients to me.
- A famous account in my niche with 50k following shared my post a couple of times, which brought me a couple of dozen of subscribers.
- I get at least one subscriber a day from Twitter.
And this is only with 750 followers I have.
This happens because I strategically tweet my lead magnets with images that worked best in the past. #myblogu
— Gill Andrews (@StoriesWithGill) May 11, 2017
Deborah Anderson also thinks that meaningful interaction is the key:
- Interact with people on Twitter. This means responding to their tweets (like you would on Facebook), favoriting tweets, retweeting/quoting, etc.
- Be discriminating. In other words, if you find that interacting and engaging with a Twitter user is working, then continue to do so and also visit their links, comment on their blog posts, etc. But, at the same time, if you find that you are not getting a response from someone, discontinue your engagement with that person and move on to the next person. You need to spend your time wisely (speaking from experience!) and so engage with those who follow a likewise engagement with you.
6. Enable Twitter Cards
This tip comes from Mikhail Khorev @iknowseoca: Enable Twitter cards on your website.
Twitter cards make tweets containing your site URLs more engaging by generating a clickable preview of your page making it stand out in the Twitter feed.
If you upload an image to go your Tweet, clicking that image expands the thumbnail (hence keeping Twitter users on Twitter). If you have Twitter cards enabled on your website, clicking the image will take users away from Twitter to your site:
On top of that, any time your reader tweets your blog post, the preview will be automatically generated each time making each Tweet coming from your website much nicer and more engaging.
It’s not difficult to have the cards installed:
- Specify the type of card for your content by adding the HTML markup found here to the HEAD section of the page
- For WordPress bloggers you can do that using this easy plugin. Here are more plugins to choose from (if you have Yoast SEO plugin installed, you won’t need an extra plugin for that)
- Only one card type per-page is supported. For bloggers, that’s going to be “Summary card with large image“
- Finally use the validator to verify that the cards are properly working on your site. Chances are, if it validates, it will start showing up in Twitter ads right away. Twitter no longer requires validation. If you are working with a Player Card, request approval for whitelisting. All other Cards do not need whitelisting.
- After testing in the validator or approval of your Player Card, Tweet the URL and see the Card appear below your Tweet in the details view.
Once you have Twitter cards working, you’ll start seeing some additional data in Twitter Analytics reporting how users engage with the cards. You’ll be able to see the data only if you have enough engagement with the cards though. For new accounts, you’ll need to give it some time.
7. Use Tweet Rotating Tools
- Raelyn Tan uses the free WordPress plugin “Revive Old Post“. It automatically tweets out my old blog posts onto my Twitter profile every 8 hours. This ensures that my website gets a steady flow of traffic from Twitter and brings new visitors to old posts that I wrote years ago. I also get to engage my followers without any effort. You can use [From my archives] disclaimer in these tweets to warn your followers these are older blog posts.
- Another tool to mention here is @drumupio. You can add your articles into its library and one-click schedule any of them to be tweeted multiple times in the coming days and months. All you need to do is to select how many times and how often you need it to be tweeted
- Social Juke Box is another great tool here. Create a box, put your blog posts these and set up how often you want them tweeted. The box will start from start once it tweets all its articles. You can see when your tweets are set to go live in the “Visual schedule”:
- Another automation tool was added by Shobha Ponnappa. MeetEdgar, a tool for automatically repetitive Twitter updates submissions. The difference between this tool and Buffer (which I was earlier relying on heavily), was that MeetEdgar has a library into which we can pack our updates for Twitter into convenient categories. We can then schedules the frequency and updates to Twitter (and also to Facebook, LinkedIn etc) according to whatever is an optimal scheduling for each social channel. We can also schedule which category of our library of tweets should go out to Twitter at which times. I usually schedule 24 tweets a day, one every half an hour round the clock. I mix up my libraries of tweets to get a good mix of curated updates plus my own blog post promotional updates. MeetEdgar then cyclically publishes whatever is in its libraries at any given times (as per set frequency/library/times of day) … so all the updates we have ever created so far and will continue to create in future will forever be cycling through Twitter. This ensures that even old blog posts get repeated exposure as the new ones do. This one tool has increased my traffic by at least 20-25%, I believe.
Yet another Twitter automation tool was suggested by Chris Well:
Only a fraction of your Twitter followers will see any one of your Tweets–so it’s important to send out a given piece of information multiple times. SocialOomph allows you to create a bucket of evergreen content that will automatically post again and again. SocialOomph also allows you to create multiple versions of the same Tweet, so you can try out different approaches: Ask a question, share a list, quote the article, ask their opinion, etc. The more times you point to the same content, the more eyeballs that see it. The more ways that you explain the content, the more likely you can engage those followers to click through for more.
8. Focus on Building High-Quality Engaged Following
Janice Wald @MrsPaznanski of MostlyBlogging shares her tips on building highly engaged following:
Twitter has become one of my top referrers of traffic due to my following these tips:
- I follow people in my niche, blogging tips. People like Neil Patel and Sam Hurley are in my niche, so I follow their followers.
- I follow people who have retweeted my links. If they are interested enough in my content they want their readers to read my posts, they are like-minded and I follow them. Since the culture of Twitter is to “follow back” people who follow you in your niche, my followers have grown this way. You want to follow like-minded bloggers so they’ll be interested in your posts.
- I return the follow of people in my niche who have followed me. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t tell me who all of them are, so I use Tweepi to discover all my new followers.
- I make sure not to let my ratio get off of followers to who I follow. I heard you should have the number you follow be lower than the number that works for you. I use StatuBrew and Crowdfire to keep that ratio in check. In this way, my Twitter following has grown, and my Twitter traffic has grown.
Shobha Ponnappa suggests using the tool called SocialQuant to increase Twitter following.
This tool uses Big Data to cull a lot of potential followers based on keywords we set in. We can set in up to 20 keywords, which can even include the names of influencers whose followers we want to reach. The tool then automatically follows people who we set as target audiences and many of them follow back. The advantage in Social Quant is that it seems like a tool built on a lot of “intelligence”. The quality of followers it reaches out to is tremendously good. It matches the profiles of people we truly want as audiences. The tool also makes suggestions for improvements in our keyword base, so it teaches us as we use it, to get more from its data mining. The tool comes with a book that teaches how to use Twitter more smartly which I found to be very useful. SocialQuant has clearly tripled or even quadrupled my following, but the great part is that all my new followers are “sharply focused target audiences” so there is big bang for the buck
To sum up this month…
Mentions:
MyBlogU community also helped in creating this awesome project:
Recommended projects to participate in:
Further reading: How to generate traffic from Facebook