How to Use Twitter To Gain Mashable Traffic

Can Twitter actually help me to gain traffic for my blog or is it a fully waste of my time? First question asked by my friend.

Perhaps you’ve pondered the same?

When people I respect started singing the praises of Twitter, I decided to give it a go. At first I just didn’t get it. I was shocked at that when I got the number of bussiness connectd with twitter.

Twitter To Gain Mashable Traffic

First, Why Twitter not other ?

I think that’s a fair starting point. I’ve heard others call Twitter a micro-blogging platform.

Here’s what you need to know. According to the State of the Twittersphere report, each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter. Current estimates of total users top out around 300 million. That’s a lot of opportunity.

Twitter allows you to post updates (called Tweets) as often as you want (and limited to 140 characters). When you follow other people on Twitter, you see their tweets. When they follow you, they see your tweets.

It’s a constant stream of communication. The good news is you can turn it on or off as often as you like. Twitter also keeps a public record of all updates, which can be mined with Twitter Search.

Why Most of High-Profile People Use Twitter

Second think is Why high-profile people use Twitter, it’s worth closer examination. Here’s what some of those gurus told me:

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com said, “We’ve found that Twitter has been a great way for us to connect on a more personal level with our employees and customers. We use it to help build our brand, not drive direct sales. It’d be like asking how does providing a telephone number for customer service translate into new business when they are mostly non-sales-related calls. In the long term, Twitter helps drive repeat customers and word of mouth, but we’re not looking to it as a way of driving immediate sales.”

Bestselling author David Meerman Scott said, “I have personally connected with hundreds of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I booked an interview on NPR and a big daily newspaper using Twitter.”

Be sure to check out this BusinessWeek article that surveyed 18 CEOs and how they’re using Twitter to help their businesses.

How Twitter Can Help You to gain traffic?

This is where it gets interesting. A lot of people are doing some very innovate things with Twitter. Here’s some of their stories.

The Twitter Plan

Cindy King, an international sales specialist, saw a huge boost in business inquires by implementing a strategic Twitter plan.

“Following the right people on Twitter was key. There are some people very gifted at building relationships on Twitter. As I followed these online community builders, I realized that some of them are also excellent direct response copywriters. They get their Twitter followers to take action,” said King.

“Light bulbs went off, and I spent a weekend putting together a tweet marketing plan and entered in 6 weeks worth of tweets, 5 a day, using TweetLater. I used a mindmap, created categories, varied times on tweets and used BUDurls so I could track results and improve my tweet plan the next time around. That was a month ago,” explained King.

When King finds a spare minute between projects, she logs into Twitter and watches what folks are talking about. When she Tweets, about 90 percent of the time she presents useful information and resources to her followers. The remaining tweets are surveys and questions. Following this strategy, King saw an 800 percent increase in inquiries about her business after she setup her Twitter campaign.

Getting In Front of High Profile People

I looked at it but couldn’t figure out why people would continually send out messages about the size of a text message, unless they were a teenager. Twitter was for sending updates they said. I don’t have time for updates, and besides, who would care?

Getting Traffic and Leads

Twitter has all but replaced our PR agency as a large percentage of our followers are press and analysts. A writer for ZDNet wrote about us and linked to us based on something we tweeted and that resulted in a huge spike in web traffic and at least one deal with a major service provider.

Mike Damphousse of Green Leads said, “Twitter is new to us. That said, in a few short weeks we’ve had definite increase in all sorts of traffic. Out of the normal inbound leads, the number has increased 15% and two of the inbounds are now active pipeline opportunities. We’ve found one extremely valuable partner relationship. We are also building PR relationships, although finding the contacts is a bit of a chore.”

Are you beginning to see the potential here?

A Few Tools to Help Your Twitter Experience

Twitter has a whole world of available support applications you can employ to gain the most of the service for your business. Here’s a few of my favorites:

TwitterFox: This Firefox web browser plugin allows you to view Tweets within your web browser (in a popup menu). This is very handy and eliminates the need to constantly go to Twitter.com.

TweetLater: This powerful service allows you to schedule tweets (much like you would schedule emails). Another very powerful feature is the ability to receive email digests of keyword activity in the Tweetosphere. This allows you to join a conversation or track topics and trends.

Ping.fm: If you have accounts with many services, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, this amazing site allows you to post updates across ALL of your social media sites in one single step.

Twitterfor Facebook: If you are on Facebook, this application forwards your Twitter updates directly to Facebook as status updates.