When retweets was first introduced, I was really really so much into it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially with the fact that if someone retweets your article, then there’s a good chance more than a thousand people can actually see it and have the opportunity to retweet it as well. It’s mainly because the potential of Twitter is really there.
Of course at first, I really didn’t figure out how I can get that much retweets that would enable me to reap those benefits. I started to install that little Tweetmeme plugin so that my readers can start retweeting my article for me. Obviously I started to realize that each of the 100 visitors will not really retweet it.
So what I did then was start using Twitter genuinely. I started following people that is related to what I’m blogging and started really giving tweeting some time. Eventually my follower count started growing and interaction has been more lively now. And not surprisingly with that, I started getting retweets.
The highest retweet count that I got is 133 and not surprisingly it came from a contest post. But then I got a little contented with the fact that at least I was getting more than 10 retweets almost every time. And now I started wondering. Is this retweets really worth it? or is it just a number that you could flaunt and brag to other people?
Ok ok. Unlike in the previous posts, I’m not gonna flash out some geeky numbers on your screen or some screenshot from Google Analytics and then explain it one by one. Studying the behavior from Twitter is a quite a it tricky that just showing stats doesn’t mean anything that much.
So for this year, Twitter has sent me over a 1000 uniques and more than 2500 pageviews. Of course the bounce rate and stickiness weren’t as effective as let’s say guest post campaigns and stuffs. Twitter has so many bot accounts and in fact I have a couple for myself and the reason for that is mainly for testing. If someone is being followed by 1000 bots, that will not make any sense right so I guess that’s why it’s not converting that well.
Of course the main benefit of it is that it’s free and if utilized well, it can be a source of free yet targeted high quality traffic for any site. But how can one utilize it and maximize its benefits? That’s literally the question of every blogger in this space. I know big guru bloggers utilize it so well that for instance, Shoemoney even called as “the best marketing medium” right now.
For me what I do is basically just host all my shortlinks via bit.ly. Bit.ly has some free basic tracking which is pretty darn good. You can find the no.of unique clicks, no.of referrers/retweets, the location they were retweeted and even the day to day activities of your posts. In fact, I already considered it’s PRO program just because of how slick it is.
If you’re using other shorteners, I’m pretty sure they have their built-in trackers as well so make sure you’re making the most by using that to analyze things.
So all in all, retweets really matter. As I said above, I got some pretty good (yet not really massive) traffic from it and from a hindsight I can say that it’s one good way to get new readers to your blog. The number of RT’s alone can quite a bit be misleading but the traffic stats will always speak for themselves. From that on, its just a matter of tweaking it more and more.
What do you think? Maybe you have some secrets to share as well?