Get big businesses to send traffic to your blog using Twitter
Just recently Chelsey wrote us a post about the best social media platforms to get traffic to her site. Of course the best ones will often vary by blogger and subject, Stumbleupon has never been great for me. But we both agreed that Twitter was useless and we weren’t afraid to say so!
That’s where Miriam had to leave a comment and clearly from reading her article, I’ve been tweeting all wrong! My eyes have cetainly been opened as to the possibilities of getting big brand traffic and mentions from Twitter and its one more area I’ll have to work on this year. I highly recommend you read Miriam’s article and perhaps it will change your mind about using Twitter for traffic.
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Get big businesses to send traffic to your blog! (it’s so easy) by guest blogger Miriam Schulman, @schulmanArt
Twitter has been around for awhile but I know many of you are intimidated or don’t understand how to harness its power. Once you get it, you can use twitter to your advantage to drive lots of traffic to your blog, and you don’t need lots of followers and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.
You don’t need lots of followers to get traffic
Having lots of followers is always great, but to drive traffic you don’t need lots of followers. What you need is terrific content on the blog the attention of the right people. This is a lot easier than you may think.
Power of the mention
A powerful tool that twitter provides is the “mention.” Now I am not talking about the almost useless #FF {#FF means follow friday} where tweeters mention a bunch of folks with a hope that they will get followed back. Remember, it is not about how many followers you have, but getting the attention of big businesses who have a captive audience and are looking for your great content. Before you get intimidated, let me explain how this works and how easy this can be for you.
Let’s pretend you are a fashion blogger. I’ve had a teenage fashion blogger guest intern for me one summer and she wrote a great article Five Wardrobe Essentials Every Artist Needs Since she mentioned several retailers in her description from J Crew to Gap, I sent out a tweet mentioned each retailer with their twitter address and a link to the blog article. Here is an example of the actual tweet I sent out then: “Dress like an artist blog post features @Anthropologie @JCrew_Insider @Gap @FEEDProjects @BananaRepublic
At this time I had less than 100 followers on twitter, so you see that the number of followers doesn’t make a difference with this social media technique. All you have to do is look up the twitter handles of any brands that may be part of your post.
Power of the retweet
Now what happens when you get mentioned in a tweet? Twitter tells you. So their social media department or unpaid intern will look at the tweets each day for their company. Maybe, they will simply retweet it or mark it as a “favorite”. Whenever I do a decorating post, I can always depend on Benjamin Moore retweeting a link to my blog if I mention their twitter handle and the name of the paint. So when Benjamin Moore, retweets this puts my blog post in front of thousands of people who are interested in decorating and those are the people who may be interested in collecting my art and reading my blog. However, the power of the mention does not just rest in the retweet.
They are looking for content too!
Let’s go back to the fashion post. I am not even sure if GAP retweeted it… maybe J Crew did, can’t remember…. but sure enough I started to get significant traffic to my blog from the GAP’s website. When checking my blog stats I saw that there was a surge of traffic coming from a GAP site and when I went to check it out I saw that the GAP had reposted an excerpt from my blog with a link to read the full article on my site! Why does this happen? These companies are looking for content and when you have a great idea they are going to let their customers know because posting our great content help their brand and is less work than coming up with their own original content!
Examples on how to use this for your business
Now you may be thinking, this doesn’t work for me because I am a “mommy blogger” or a “travel photographer” or whatever and I will tell you that this works for nearly every blog post I write. Writing a blog post about an art show? Mention @metmuseum and watch them retweet to their thousands of followers. I’ve had many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, retweet my content and sometimes even post the blog on their facebook pages. Go traveling? Mention the chamber of commerce for that city…use a product for your DIY project? Let them know. See how easy this is? You don’t even have to learn how to use hashtags…(which by the way still stumps me, must be a generational thing.)
How do you use twitter to send traffic to your blog or website? Do you take advantage of the power of the “mention”?
Want to know how I tweeted this post? Follow me on twitter and find out!
March 3, 2014 @ 6:32 am
Brilliant. So easy, yet I never thought about it.
By the way, my main traffic source is StumbleUpon. Sends thousands of visitors to my blog everyday. In the beginning I thought too that it didn’t work. Then one of my posts went viral, and now many other posts get picked up as well.
March 3, 2014 @ 9:44 am
Glad you liked it- stumble upon is the site I have been neglecting!
March 3, 2014 @ 8:08 am
Fantastic post – really got me thinking x
March 3, 2014 @ 9:45 am
Happy you found this helpful!
March 3, 2014 @ 8:18 am
This is great, thanks for the tips! I have been focusing on Twitter and have been seeing a lot of traffic from it but this gives me more ways to use it.
March 3, 2014 @ 6:09 pm
you’re welcome Jenna!
March 3, 2014 @ 9:21 pm
I’m a huge fan of twitter so agree with everything here. Great advice and great post!
Best wishes,
Natasha in Oz
http://www.natashainoz.com
March 10, 2014 @ 9:12 am
you are most welcome Natasha~
March 6, 2014 @ 12:51 am
This method is very useful, I use twitter much of my time but this tips help me more with it. Thank Mariam
March 10, 2014 @ 9:15 am
glad you found these tips useful Andy!
March 8, 2014 @ 10:39 am
Great article Miriam, I definitely need to rethink how I use twitter as well!
Tania
March 10, 2014 @ 9:13 am
you’re welcome Tania and thanks for letting me know about the Moms Make money blog!!!
March 8, 2014 @ 3:08 pm
Wow. This was really insightful and up until five minutes ago I also thought Twitter was useless. Thanks!
Georgia
March 10, 2014 @ 9:14 am
glad this opened up new possibilities for you Georgia!
March 10, 2014 @ 1:02 am
I have tried this a couple of times but didnt work for me, maybe I was targeting the wrong brands
March 10, 2014 @ 8:55 am
I guess its a case of keep trying and keep trying different people. Might be worth thinking about how you could incorporate a brand mention while writing your post, just to give you the opportunity to tag? One really big share could bring in a lot of new readers.
March 10, 2014 @ 9:10 am
Hi Divya,
You notice in my example above that GAP was the only brand that responded in a big way. A lot depends on who is running their social media department and how well those people understand how to harness twitter as well! For example, occasionally I will get a brand who merely replies to my tweet thanking me but doesn’t include the link in the reply. this does absolutely nothing for me, and absolutely nothing for their brand. So the brand misses out on an opportunity for free press. Sometimes, it will take longer before I see the results of the mention. For example, I offer free printables for newsletter subscribers which I recommend you print on Avery or staples paper. Avery had “favorited” the tweet and I didn’t see traffic to my blog HOWEVER later I learned they had added the printable to their pinterest board so the traffic was going directly to my newsletter sign ups! Hope this clarifies it for you.
Best, Miriam
March 10, 2014 @ 1:34 am
This is awesome! Thanks for the great info!!
March 10, 2014 @ 7:39 am
This is very helpful I need to think about those things when tweeting.
March 10, 2014 @ 9:13 am
glad you found this useful Jennifer!
March 19, 2014 @ 5:43 pm
Oh. My. Gosh!! I never ever thought of using Twitter that way! I always wondered how it would work and you have demonstrated just that! Thank you for sharing…
March 24, 2014 @ 12:55 am
Super content! Your writing inspires me to be a better blogger.
Thanks for your GREAT ideas.
October 28, 2014 @ 1:02 am
This method absolutely works, I even wrote a post about it after my blog traffic surged from a post that was retweeted and Pinned by Money Saving Mom a few months back. I’m glad there are others out there who agree with a strategy that I’ve personally found useful.
November 9, 2014 @ 2:39 pm
I’m going to try this today! Thank you so much!
November 29, 2014 @ 9:26 am
Thank God I landed to your blog. That was a great great tip. Will follow your idea for traffic from twitter. Thank you too.