I have long since known that targeted tweets produce better results than non-targeted tweets. What's a targeted tweet? Well quite simply it is a message to a particular person using @name. I know that when I send out a tweet to all the Indie Authors I know, referencing an Interview with a link, I will receive about 100 hits to my blog (out of approximately 188 total @names). That's a 53% hit rate using targeted tweets. So I got to thinking, what if I took this idea to another level? What if I targeted 8,000 of my followers with a direct message? Would it work on that level? Of course, there was only one way to find out and that was to try it.
First of all I found a site online that would download 10,000 of my followers into a spreadsheet (more about that in another post). Then I sorted those followers by number of tweets they had sent (figuring less than 100 and they were not very active), and I dropped off the bottom 2,000. That left me with 8,000 @names. I further sorted these into four columns of 2,000 names, concatenated them together, added a tweet header and exported the whole list of 2,000 tweets into another spreadsheet. A sample tweet was as follows: FREE book to download http://bit.ly/VN9Y8y @MusicByStan @VisionFord @VintageDTSP @musixmouth. The link leads directly to a post on my blog that lists all my books including one for FREE.
Following along? Good. After this it was just a case of using AutoTweeter Pro to schedule them (at approximately 5 minute intervals). I figured that sending 2,000 tweets at 12 tweets an hour would take about a week to complete. Hopefully that was spreading them out enough and these new tweets were interspersed with the regular tweets I was sending out (as mentioned in my previous article). I was interested to see whether I could achieve another 50% rate of @names to page hits. To be successful I would need to achieve 4,000 page hits from my 2,000 tweets.
The results were amazing. I achieved greater than my targeted 50% - my blog page hits increased by over 600 per day - and I also doubled my book sales for the month in one week! My net loss on Twitter followers was actually negative. I increased my followers during the week by 85. So all in all, I have nothing but positive things to say about this whole overtweeting experiment.
Watch out next month for Part Three in this series - 'Afterthoughts and Summary.'
Receive Special Offers, Discounts and FREE books!
Tweets followed by a number of people reflect the sign of popularity.
ReplyDelete