Results from June's Twitter Experiment

The end of May I announced that I would be conducting a Twitter experiment to see if increased activity on Twitter would increase traffic to my blogs.  If you recall May's Twitter experiment ran from April 28 to May 28 and resulted in 27 visits across all 6 blogs or about 1 visit daily from Twitter over the 6 blogs.  I was curious if increasing my activity on Twitter would affect traffic to my blogs.  All new blog posts are tweeted on Twitter through twitterfeed so that did not change for the purposes of this experiment. 

What I did - I had a daily presence on Twitter for the month of June posting not only additional links to my blogs but simply just interacting and posting little tidbits about what was going on that day.  I also posted 5 to 10 extra links to my blogs daily.

Results - The overall traffic results were quite promising!  Traffic from Twitter over the 6 blogs increased to 83 or and average of almost 3 visits per day across the 6 blogs from Twitter.  It was likely a bit higher because I missed some on the cooking blog where traffic spiked due to increased advertising.  Essentially by being more active on Twitter traffic increased from 1 to 3 visits per day across the 6 blogs.  By far the bulk of the traffic went to my cooking blog that was promoted more than the others.

Observations - Being more active on Twitter while watching my stats at the same time allowed me to make a few observations and be a bit analytical:

• post feed timing does matter - I have my scheduled posts set to post at 7:00 AM and while the feed does bring traffic I noticed that on days where I did not have a scheduled post so wrote one later that day, I actually got a bit more traffic that day.
• extra link posting - This really was hit and miss.  I found the cooking links did better posted in the morning or early afternoon which makes sense given followers are looking for something to make for dinner.  Extra links to the other blogs seemed to be just interest clicks with no real timing pattern.
• retweets - This was sporadic and definitely hit and miss.  I did not track how many hits came from retweets which would be rather difficult anyway since it is still the same link originally posted coming through the retweet.
• followers - There is no doubt over the one month period that I did pick up a few new followers.
• being active takes work - Like any other blog traffic generating method being active on Twitter takes work.  For it to work seamlessly there should be your RSS feed going to Twitter and  interaction on Twitter.  On a daily basis this does take work because not only are you promoting yourself and your blog you are involved in conversations, retweeting and posting other interesting content.  Having constant or fairly constant internet connection is a real plus and being able to tweet from mobile devices is almost a must!  This is a case where ideally a lot of tweets are made on a daily basis.  The reality is life does get in the way so making daily non-scheduled tweets is not always as easy as it seems.

Conclusions -  Clearly being more active on Twitter can bring traffic to your blogs.  It can also increase your followers with a greater potential to increasing traffic.  It is very important to mix blog promotion with other Twitter interaction though.  I will continue being quite active on Twitter as time permits.  I feel that while this experiment shows that simply by being active on Twitter blog traffic will increase, the more active on a constistent and longer time frame the traffic can only increase.

Garden Gnome
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