How Not Tweeting Decreases Site Traffic by 71%
Throughout my marketing career, I’ve encountered numerous indies who question the value of social media promotion…especially Twitter. While their reasons for doubting Twitter vary, my response remains the same: with over 550 million active registered users and free access to market to them, it would be incredibly unwise to ignore Twitter. But alas, no matter how hard I try to get my point across, skeptics remain. So, I decided to put my words to action and run my own test to prove the power of Twitter. Here’s what I did:
The Test
Over the past two weeks, I have tested the value of Twitter promotion on Indie Game Girl. For the first week (Nov. 4-10), I followed my Tweet schedule to a T: Tweeting regularly, engaging with others, etc. The second week (Nov. 11-17), I did absolutely nothing on Twitter. Below are the results.
The Results
| w/ Twitter Promotion | w/out Twitter Promotion | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retweets | 33 | 7 | -79% |
| Favorites | 41 | 10 | -76% |
| Mentions | 44 | 14 | -68% |
| Followers | 43 | 35 | -19% |
| Traffic from Twitter (visits) | 101 | 29 | -71% |
5 Comments
Dave
about 11 years agoWow, thanks for the self sacrifice to come up with numbers to help some of us realize what we're missing out on.
Emmy
about 11 years agoYou are welcome! Thanks for the comment.
Csaba
about 11 years agoEmmy, It's fantastic that you would do this kind of experiment for our benefit. And the results are impressive. I have three questions: 1) Your tweet schedule doesn't mention the total amount of time you spend on a weekly basis preparing, executing, culling, etc. 2) Could you apply that time to other social media activities and have an impact? Or maybe to create special content above and beyond your regular blog? 3) Is there a way you can track the visitors from your tweets versus other avenues? You may get a lot of traffic from them...but are they value added? Does their attention span extend longer than a tweet when they stop by? Regardless of the answers to these questions, I still agree with your conclusion. Tweeting on a regular basis has an impact. Best, Csaba
Emmy
about 11 years agoHi Csaba, Thank you for the comment and good questions. Here are my answers: 1. I spend about 1 hour on Sunday night scheduling all my tweets via Hootsuite. 2. Yes, I could, however, I think having a regular social media posting schedule is very valuable and so I put that one hour per week into it. 3. This is an excellent question. More indies should think like this. You are starting to get into "lifetime value," which is measuring how much a customer is worth to you on average over his/her lifetime (i.e., how much do they spend with you over his/her lifetime). With my site, it's a little tricky because I'm not selling anything, however, I could tie the duration of the visit to acquisition method. All indies reading this should tie the amount a customer spends via acquisition method. So, you can track what sources visitors come to your site via Google Analytics. Click "Acquisition" form the left-hand column and then "All Traffic." Make sure you set your timeframe to the desired range and then find what source you are looking for. Twitter will appear as t.co. Once you click the referrer, you can see all the stats. One of them is "Avg. Visit Duration." Mine is 2:25. Not too bad! Nice questions. Emmy
Robert
about 11 years agoCahaba she covered that in a previous article re: Tweet schedule: here is the link:https://www.indiegamegirl.com/real-twitter-followers/ For the rest of it the Indie Game Girl Emmy will have to comment on.