i’ve really enjoyed the discussion that my experiment has generated. this has always been a really low traffic blog, although i’ve always felt like it could do better. in the last few days i’ve somehow attracted the attention of people who would never have come here before, and i credit that, largely, to twitter. so it’s true, you can use twitter to increase your site’s traffic (presuming you have stuff on your site that’s always being updated).
here are my twitter schoolbus notes from the weekend:
day 3
today i tried something different. i tried another trick that other people do which is follow who your friends are following. since this whole experiment came out of the twitter rocket thing, i decided to start with the source: @morganzero. except, @morganzero is following over 10,000 people, and has said that he follows everyone back (excluding, i assume, the spambots). how do i find anything relevant in that mess? i’m sure not going to go through all 10,000 (although, i’m also sure that if i did, i’d have a straight shot to a massive following). so instead, i went through his twitter stream and found anyone he @mentioned and followed them. the people he deems worthy of having a conversation with are probably worthwhile and fairly relevant. i went all the way through his feed back before twitter rocket existed.
then i had another idea.
after reading a couple posts on glorybug’s blog, i was inspired to to a twitter search for “twitter rocket.” as expected, most of the results were affiliates. a few were folks annoyed by all the twitter rocket spam. since that’s still topical (at least to my current topic), i followed all of them, too, again, going 5 pages deep into the search results (granted, as a rule, twitter rocket affiliates post multiple times about twitter rocket, so there were some repeats in there). that bumped my following count to 462. at the end of the day (midnight, MST), i had 204 followers.
day 4
today i searched for “indie art”. this was my favorite search yet as i saw a LOT of awesome twitter backgrounds. i got a few design inspirations for making twitter backgrounds for arcane palette in the process. this tells me that this is really the type of thing i should be doing, not only for my own blog, but for arcane palette, too. it would be easy to find followers in our niche by doing searches like this.
again i went 5 pages deep into the search results, although this time, if i noticed they @mentioned someone in the last tweet or two, i followed them, too. at the end of that process, i was following 524 people. i decided it was time to chart my progress. since it was too early for twitterholic to start showing stuff (since i hadn’t indexed teh_s3quence yet), i googled for a graph-making tool and found this.
as you can see from the graph, though there’s a big gap between how many people i’m following vs. being followed by, the progression is pretty much equal (except for day 4, where the followers tapered off. i blame this either on it being the weekend, lower user activity and older tweets from the search results, or possibly twitter rocket users who don’t appreciate my skepticism). this is all i ask for, in fact, this means that everything is working perfectly.
from this point on, i’ll be tracking the data but reporting on the progress less often. it’s boring blogging about stats and i can’t imagine it makes a good read. and anyway, you get the idea: do a search for something you’re interested in or is in your niche, and follow people who are talking about it. it’s not rocket science. (pun intended.)
Leave a Reply