How to increase traffic on your blog using Twitter?

Here is a small case study on how you can use Twitter as a social networking tool to “create” a new loyal public for your blog.

Hello, my name is Twitter

As an experiment, I started my own Twitter account about six months ago.
Sure, I heard about Twitter, as a micro-blogging platform, limiting any update to 140 characters of text, but did not really feel the immediate use for me, as a blogger. I understood even less how it could help me to drive traffic to my blog until I really started using it.
I -uneasily- posted my first updates (or “Tweets”) like “It is a lovely day in Rome” and “A busy day at work”. Not much fun, it seemed, as I did not understand how anyone would discover my Twitter blog. Using the search function with “moneyblog” as a keyword and “#moneyblog” as a hash tag I was surprised of the amount of people I found with like-minded interests. I started to “follow” them, a key function that makes Twitter a great social community tool.

Using the tool

Getting regular feedback from my Twitter-followers, I “upgraded” my Tweets from the “Traffic is a bum in Rome today” Tweets to also post links to articles I found interesting, and I regularly posted pictures from my mobile phone using Twitpic.
Low and behold, after my slow Twitter-start, people started to follow me back and in a couple of months, I had a group of followers of 100 people.
This TwitterCounter graph of my follower-count clearly shows the tipping point came in February, at about 100 followers: from then on I did not have to look for like-minded followers anymore, they found me!

And now…: Driving traffic from Twitter to my blog

Early on, I made it a habit to also Tweet a link to any new blogpost I published on my personal blog. I could see – much to my surprise – an impact on the traffic on my blog. In a few days, Google Analytics showed traffic coming in on my blog. From the moment my “Twitter Tipping Point” occured, something like 30 people/week started coming in:

Daily amount of visitors Twitter sends to my blog. Look at the peak after mid Feb

You might think “Hmm 30 new visitors per week is not really all that impressive”, but Analytics can only track referral traffic from Twitter when people use Twitter’s website to read updates. The majority of Twitter-ers use one or the other desktop interface like Twhirl, which Analytics does not track as Twitter being the referral site. In reality, my own Tweets with links to new blogposts generated between 100 to 150 visits per week. Now, we are talking.. Quite a return for a small effort.
When I compared the figures of my “new visitors” on my blog from before and after “my Twitter tipping point” I really saw the impact of Twitter on my blog traffic: my new visitor count increased from 64% to 83%, indicating a whole new heap of people discovered my blog for the first time.
And to top it off: those new visitors stayed twice as long on my blog, showing they were more interested in what I wrote. This is the social networking force of Twitter at it best: as these Twitter followers and I have common interests (otherwise they would not follow me on Twitter), they were obviously also interested in what I wrote on my blog. I had used – be it by coincidence rather than by intent – Twitter, to create a new public for my blog.

My advise for non-profit organisations with a blog:

1. Start a Twitter blog and create your own audience of followers.
2. Inbetween your regular Tweets, post your blog (or website) updates. This will guarantee a traffic increase of people truly interested in what you blog about, which is the quality traffic we – serious bloggers – see as our most precious public.
3. Make the circle complete: Publish your Twitter updates on your blog and feature a prominent “Follow me on Twitter” icon.  This will increase your amount of quality Twitter followers too…