Twitter

[philiporchard]

I'd be interested to know how many use Twitter for promoting businesses etc?

We've just started a Twitter feed for each of our city sites, as we gear up for launch, which should be later this month.

Our Cardiff site is: www.Twitter.com/cardiffcouk

 

[kendalcottages]

I use it for a number of businesses and get quite a bit of traffic from it (one of my Twitter accounts has over 50,000 followers). However, I'm not convinced that it brings quality visitors. Analytics suggests my Twitter traffic has a far higher bounce rate than anything else.

 

[retired_member34]

Twitter is very easy to automate, and partly due to this is appears to be a magnet for spam (or spambots). The vast majority of accounts are just this.

We experimented a bit for one town site, and rapidly built up a few thousand followers for a fairly small town. However, they were mostly bots or irrelevant to the town and as such useless. We scrapped it and started again, but this time we did not "follow back" and actively blocked any followers that did not appear real. Now it is taking ten or twenty times as long to build followers (we are only at 150, whereas before we had nearly 3,000). We tweet and retweet items that we think will be genuinely interesting to residents of the town, and link to our site a lot less. Both ways though it has produced little in the way of traffic, but at the moment there is very little on our site that is tweet worthy!

There are a couple of good feeds covering Cardiff for the general public (I know this is only one of your areas, but it happens to be local to me). @GdnCardiff (the Guardian's Cardiff site) I think does it well, has far more followers than following, but still only a small number at 1,100 odd. Another is @Buzz_Magazine (an old and well established local events magazine), who similarly doesn't use the follow back trap.

All IMHO of course, and I'd be very interested in the views of others using Twitter. I assume you are looking at Facebook also?

 

[retired_member13]

I've been on Twitter 18 months, and in my experience the only traffic building thing that really works on there (and on social networking as a whole really) is "linkbait" - ie post something on your site that is newsworthy, funny, rude or astonishing enough that when you tweet a link to it people retweet it and it goes viral - this can get you a lot of visitors and a lot of new followers, it's also amazing where these links end up and the resultant effects on PR and ranking.

All the above said, keeping Twitter going is a fair bit of effort if you're building a following, so I kinda lost interest after a bit when I stopped blogging and started building my UK sites last summer.

If anyone on here wants to touch base on Twitter I'm

http://twitter.com/TyHancocks

Ty

 

[retired_member25]

I run the twitter accounts of a few regional newspapers - A great way we've built up an engaged twitter following is by really focusing tweets on the town we're targeting - We ask our followers for recommendations of things to do at the weekend etc - If you make it a two way process then you're likely to get a much more engaged following.

Also, when building up targeted followers - Use Twitter Advanced Search to find followers based in Cardiff and follow them - They're the most likely to find your tweets interesting and relevent and as such you're more likely to get a follow back

 

[WestHamFan]

I use Twitter to attract traffic to niche websites and it is going quite nicely for me.

I run a few sites that use eBay to monetize them. Although you cannot post eBay links directly on Twitter now you can still post links to your own affiliate websites.

So I pick out an eBay auction from a targeted RSS search feed, tweet that auction via twitter's API and attach a link that sends people to my website where the items from the same RSS feed are displayed. The whole process is done using PHP and automated to run every couple of hours using a cron job.

I also generate regular new articles on the websites to tweet and, by keeping the eBay auctions tweeted highly relevant to the niche subjects, get no complaints of spam, new followers every day and - while I've no doubt much of the traffic is worthless - it is still generating a useful regular income for me from the "real" traffic attracted.

 

[robbaker]

Twitter so far has been an awesome source of traffic for us, right up there with the big g, with our followers currently at about 3,600 and growing by 100 or so followers per day. However, the traffic, as kendall pointed out, is does not appear to be quality. Conversions from twitter are lower than any other source, even those sources that have produced very little traffic.

 

[fish]

I use Twitter to attract traffic to niche websites and it is going quite nicely for me.

I run a few sites that use eBay to monetize them. Although you cannot post eBay links directly on Twitter now you can still post links to your own affiliate websites.

So I pick out an eBay auction from a targeted RSS search feed, tweet that auction via twitter's API and attach a link that sends people to my website where the items from the same RSS feed are displayed. The whole process is done using PHP and automated to run every couple of hours using a cron job.

I also generate regular new articles on the websites to tweet and, by keeping the eBay auctions tweeted highly relevant to the niche subjects, get no complaints of spam, new followers every day and - while I've no doubt much of the traffic is worthless - it is still generating a useful regular income for me from the "real" traffic attracted.

It would be interesting to know if your EPC has gone down using above methods? I know of a few people who recently got an email from eb telling them they have to improve their traffic quality ...

sorry it's off original thread topic

 

[ddwebguru]

Though the basic purpose of using twitter is give expression to one's thoughts and views, but gradually it has evolved as a vital medium of online marketing and in fact, seo experts are giving more importance to it. Personally, i use my Twitter account for getting more exposure and I am yet to explore another streak of my personality in it.

 

[kendalcottages]

Interesting that eBay should be doing that. I would have thought that they wouldn't really be too concerned with one or two sites bringing in traffic weren't really delivering the goods. It's not like they'd be pulling masses of bandwidth in the scale of things, surely?

 

[bensd]

Hi,

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. ..
a succession of chirps as uttered by birds; to utter a succession of bird's chirps; (of a person) to talk in an excited or nervous manner; to ...
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows people to type in short messages or status updates that can be read by people following them. ..

Regards,

Why are this user and their posts (over the last few days) still on here?