Social Marketing With Twitter - A Traffic Experiment

In this article I want to share my experience with Twitter.

I love to explore new fields and I was wondering how good is the social marketing that people are trying to do. I read a book with tips on how you can improve your twitter experience and how easy it is to drive traffic to your site with a short post of 140 characters.

In the book there was an example how the author get 20-30 visits to his site from just one post when he has about 1000 followers. OK... I started to think - if I have 3k followers then I can have 100 visitors to my site with just one post.
Sounds great, right?

And here comes the experiment... I'm web developer and I thought I should try making a tool that is twitter-related. Obviously when I try to pull traffic from twitter I should make a tool or share information that is targeted to these users.
So I made a small tool where you enter your twitter details and it displays a map of your twitter followers. It is a visual representation of the locations of the user's followers.

In this tool I used the twitter API to pull the list of followers and then I put pins on Google map (this is the tool: http://friendloc.webily.com/).

It is free tool and I don't have anything put on this page to generate leads or any attempts for monetization of the traffic. It is just an experiment for now... so... let's see the results.

I have more than 2k followers on twitter and I posted 2 updates about this tool. I made these posts in the most active time on twitter. Actually this is what I supposed is the most active time - the evenings in USA, because most of my followers are Americans.

From these 2 posts I have total of 12 visitors to the site. Not a great result, but I suppose it can be improved if I’m more active on twitter. You see... you need to establish connection with your followers and bring really valuable (and mostly free) information. And you should chat with them more actively. I love twitter and I find really great information and resources from the post of the twitters I follow. When I love the posting I try to thank the poster and build a relationship... I discuss the resource shared with him and this is a kind of becoming friend with this particular user.

If you make lot of friends there probably your results will be better.

So try to give valuable information, try to interact more with your followers and you're on the right path to drive targeted traffic to your site.

And just a quick comparison with the other traffic sources I used:
Digg - 30 visitors in a month;
ViralNetworks (post in the forum) - 20 visits in a month;
LinkedIn (news posting in 2 groups with about 1 mln members) - 18 visits in 2 days;
StumbleUpon - 10 visits in 1 week;
Facebook (I have less than 200 friends there) - 7 visits in a month.

I think LinkedIn performs best from these social sites I tried.

Total of 133 unique visitors in a month.  Not a great result, but for the time spent (1 hour to build the tool and 10-15 minutes to post on the social sites) I think it is not bad. If you write an article in 10 minutes and drive this traffic it is great. 10 articles in a month and you have 1000 visitors. If you manage to monetize this traffic then... this is the way to make money on the internet. :-)

Hope you find my experiment and the results useful.

Thanks for reading and wish you luck!