31 Days to a Better Tweep

Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Julius.

I recently decided to do an experiment: I would try to become a Better Tweep in 31 days. And I believe I have made it.

It was extremely interesting and I must say that I have learned a lot. In this article I want to share the things I have learned from twittering actively for 31 days.

Things to Do

At the beginning of the experiment I jotted down what I wanted to do to get more traffic from Twitter and to also get to know more people. So here is what I did:

• follow more people
• retweet other people’s tweets
• ask question and engage other people
• post quotes

So these were the things I planned on doing. One last thing I did was to comment on articles that were retweeted on Twitter.

Twitter stats before the experiment:
Following: around 400
Followers: around 250

From the first day on not only did I start to become more active in Twitter but also on other websites such as Blog Engage or MMO. It was awesome because I did end up reading new articles from blogs I have never visited but it consumed a lot of time.

Nine days after starting my Twitter challenge I had to change my Twitter mail settings because my email inbox was getting flooded with follower mails and direct messages.

Unfollowing Tweeps

What is interesting is that I have gained around 50 followers within one single day. The reason is probably because I started to follow more people these days. But the reason for this many followers is that I hadn’t unfollowed people up to that point.

On the next day I started unfollowing people and almost didn’t get any new followers. Few days later I unfollowed more people and the number of my followers fell again rapidly.

So once you start to unfollow some people that aren’t tweeting interesting things or that are simply spamming you tend to get a lot less followers. That in turn might mean that most people on Twitter are using automated software to follow new people. These new people are the ones who simply don’t unfollow other people.

This kept me from unfollowing too many people. The day after that experience I decided to simply follow the people that are tweeting interesting stuff and to unfollow lots of people once I have finished the experiment.

Twitter Analytics Stats

To be honest I haven’t gotten that much traffic through Twitter while doing the experiment. My theory is simple. The more active you are in any community (or social media site) the more traffic you are going to get from it.

Even though I was active on Twitter I didn’t spend too much time on it. I think that if I had spent more time on it then I would have gotten a lot more traffic.

Anyway below are the stats from the Twitter referral traffic. As you can see there is an increase in traffic but it’s not that high. This can also be of course because some analytics software has trouble measuring traffic from Twitter.

The green line is the traffic from the month before and the blue line is indicating the time frame of my experiment.

As you can see below the traffic increased at 150% according to Google Analytics though the number of visits are still quite low. The interesting thing is that you can see that everything that measures reader interest has increased too.

All stats increasing

The average time on site has increased by 2689% along with the pages/visit. And especially the bounce rate was reduced by 60%. That means that the visitors I gained through Twitter were a lot more interested in my content. I also believe that the people who visited were also more likely to know me because of the 23% decrease in new visits.
Twitter stats at the end of the experiment:
Following: around 620
Followers: 400

The number below show that I have gotten around 5 followers each day which I believe is not too bad. Of course you can take this experiment to a new extreme and get even more followers by simply mass-following people. But I wanted to keep this experiment as natural as possible.

What do you think? Was this helpful to you?

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2. My Pathetic Belief about Social Media
3. How to Track Your Web Site Visitors
4. My Mini Site Experiment
5. 3 Essential Google Analytics Reports