11 Ways to Maximise Traffic From Twitter

Josh here: I’m done with high school forever, and I have 5 months off till uni. I’m now going to try to blog at least once a week. Cheers and enjoy the post :).

There are two parts to maximizing traffic from twitter – first, you’ll need a boatload of followers (preferably a boatload of pirates from Somalia :D)  and to format you tweet correctly to allow the most number of clicks from your followers.

So firstly, you’ll need a crane load of followers. But how do you do that?

Your Twitter Profile

[singlepic id=18 w=320 h=240 mode=watermark float=right] 1. Have a twitter Profile Picture – Hopefully a picture of your face, or a personal branding/logo. Research shows that a person with a picture has 10 times more followers than one without. But never, never have a picture of a half-naked girl. Not only are you offended the ladies, but you already lost half off your potential readers as only men are more likely to click on your tweets. (Lame, but too true). Having a picture of a half-naked picture only makes you look more like a spammer too.

2. Fill In Your Bio – with something relevant and interesting. Not just “Student”, or “Porn Director” – be descriptive, and mostly, be brief. You only have 160 characters so you’ll have to be creative. Remember, D0n’7 wr173 1n søm3 fαñcy ʎɐʍ that you find artsy – remember, you are targeting other people to follow you, and they may not be able to read your bio.

3. Don’t spam, especially spamming #trendingtopics hashtags with unrelated items – it can also get you banned – careful there. [singlepic id=16 w=320 h=240 mode=watermark float=right]

4. Follow others! That’s right. This has to be the most effective way to meet new people (and sneakily get new followers as they follow you back). But to be honest, I’ve met some really interesting and great people by following and chatting with them. If I didn’t follow them in the first place, I’ve have never knew what I missed out.

5. You should tweet things that are generally around one central topic. For example, an account called @livetechnews should be tweeting about, well tech news and gadgets and not oral health. Also, never ever tweet about everything you are doing right now. No one cares if you just ate a ham sandwich for lunch. Tweet about things that are interesting. I totally fail at this rule, I tweet about anything & everything 🙂

6. @reply people when they talk to you. Don’t just ignore people (unless they are spammers of course, which you should promptly block and report them for spam). This may not seem like an obvious way to get more clicks, but interacting with people allows you to keep your Twitter account active. Yes, having loads of followers is good, but having a load of spam/bot followers isn’t, and won’t get you much traffic to your site.

The Tweet itself

Obviously, you are trying get the maximum traffic from twitter to your site/blog, so you’ll need to format your tweet correctly to get the maximum traffic too! Here’s how you do that:

7. Keep the tweet simple. For a blog post, the simpliest format (and the format you should use) is “[BlogPostTitle] [ShortenedLink]” – Remember the K-I-S-S philosophy – Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex your tweet is, the harder it is for your followers to understand what you’re trying to convey.

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Keep It Simple Stupid!

8. Never have an @username, hyperlink, and a hashtag in a single tweet. For example, my tweet is “@Apple launched a new Macbook http://bit.ly/link #mac #apple #macbook”. Having any of these three things make Twitter create a “link”, with shows as a different color. Your follower could get distracted on the hashtag. Then they check out @Apple. And then they totally forget about the link.  Look how this looks as a tweet:

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Too complicated & distracting!

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Much Better!

9. Place the most important keywords at the beginning and the end of the tweet. Remember the Google Heat Map? Your most important information should be on your top left, or in the case of a tweet, the first few (and last) characters of a tweet. Confused? Here’s what I mean:

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Yes, you may need to restructure your sentence to get to most clicks to your link.

10. Never ever post a full link to your blog post. eg. http://joshlam.com/2009/09/comparsion-the-13-twitter-advertising-networks/, but instead have a shortened link like http://bit.ly/3g2yd1 it’ll make your tweets look neater, and your followers will focus more on your actual blog title, rather than the long link. Also, remember, you’re limited to 140 characters – shortening links saves space too.

11. Use established URL shorteners. Try not to use some unknown URL shortener. Here’s a list of the most trustworthy (and most popular) URL shorteners: -I would generally stick to the top two shorteners.

bit.ly

j.mp

is.gd

sn.im

cli.gs

goo.gl (Google’s own one, you’ll need to install their toolbar)

Bonus

Here’s two awesome tricks with j.mp and bit.ly – they are the same company, thus, their links are interchangeable. For example, this bit.ly link: http://bit.ly/3g2yd1 redirects to the same site as http://j.mp/3g2yd1