About a year ago I did a case study on the use of Twitter by BBGeeks.com – a site I own about BlackBerry phones. We were using Twitter as sort of a guerrilla marketing tactic to increase traffic to our site and more importantly, promote our brand.
The results were encouraging – we’d acquired 500 followers in a short period of time and found they were actually visiting our site and engaging with us as a result. The initial results were promising enough that we kept with it, kept learning, kept testing – and we’re very glad we did.
We went on building our brand via being an “online help desk” of sorts for BlackBerry issues, much like we did in the previous case study:
- One of the BBGeeks.com staff was the voice of @bbgeeks on Twitter.
- We continued in our belief that our goal should be for him to become a BlackBerry trouble shooter (.i.e. help people) first, promotional evangelist (i.e. drop links) for BBGeeks.com second.
- None of our tweets were automated, not even links to our blog posts – if we didn’t feel it was worth dropping by hand, we didn’t drop it.
- We continued to seek out BlackBerry users via various search methods.
We had built our following up to about 5000 people by February of 09. Our traffic from Twitter continued to grow from the time we’d last graphed it and we were starting to get excited about the possibilities even larger follower counts might bring:
In March of this year, we really “geared up” our efforts. We began to be more aggressive in seeking out followers:
- We began to seek out the Twitter accounts of our major competitors and follow their followers… if they were interested in the competition enough to follow them, chances were, they’d be interested in us too.
- We ran contests to get people to retweet about us to their followers.
- We sought out top twitterers we knew had an interest in BlackBerries.
- We continued to be extremely helpful to anyone would could, and in turn, those folks often told other folks about us when their friends had BlackBerry issues arise.
Within a month, our follower count had gone to five figures and over the next few months, it continued to rise steadily:
Our traffic from Twitter also severely increased over those next few months:
Now, if we go by Danny Sullivan’s theory that analytics under-counts Twitter traffic by as much as 500%, our actual traffic numbers from Twitter, in theory, may have more resembled the below during that timeframe:
At the time this post was written, BBGeeks has over 19,000 followers on Twitter. Based on internal data that I’m not willing to share (hey, you can’t expect the entire farm for free), I can tell you that Twitter traffic converts higher than any other social network we track to date, by leaps and bounds. Twitter traffic actually clicks on our affiliate links, on our contextual ads and uses our coupon codes (we run Twitter only coupon codes sometimes).
In addition to the direct revenue Twitter brings us, it also helps increase our brand, gives Google signals of our authority and trust and it has been directly responsible for many links we’ve acquired.
Twitter also helps us develop content that contributes heavily to our long tail search volume on the site from various search engines. As I mentioned in my last case study:
We get tons of content ideas from the various questions and problems we see our followers and the people we are following experiencing.
My theory is that if folks were looking for answers to specific questions and/or problems on Twitter, non Twitter folks were likely typing those same queries into search engines as well. So we started a dedicated section of our site we refer to as the Twitter help files.
In it, we round up the various questions we receive each month, the answers we’ve given and develop and entire post of “long tail” information that is helpful to search users. Additionally, the folks who help us out by asking us these questions get some promotion to our large readership as well.
Win, win.
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Rae, thanks for this post. This sheds light on an aspect of social media marketing I could not quite get a handle on, and ways to expand. Nicely done :) sherry
As Rae is already aware, feel free to Sphinn it here: http://sphinn.com/story/122990
Thanks for the post, interesting study and one I will surely use. I would like your opinion though (and everyone else’s for that matter). Currently I am developing a website that has a twitter icon in the top right of the site, that displays the latest tweets. If you click on the bird, you go to the twitter page to follow me. Is this a smart move? Is it too confusing to have both functions related to one icon? Should I even display tweets on my site?
Wait, what’s Twitter?
Seriously, good stuff here. I get that there are many benefits including getting good content ideas, better understanding your market, building brand loyalty and CRM, etc. Lots of great fluffy soft benefits. Yay.
Did you notice significant conversions from Twitter traffic? Did you notice many inbound links to your site that you can attribute to your Twitter presence?
Or were satisfied just with the previously mentioned benefits, all of which are fine in their own right.
???
Jon, if you read the post, you can see I already answered both of your questions re conversions and links.
Well sure, you had to go and hide it smack in the middle of the post. Okay you caught me skimming :) Good stuff.
You said Twitter converts better than other social networks… how’s that compare to organic search traffic? Much better? Much worse? About the same?
I’m one of these SEO guys who has very little experience with traffic from social networks so I have no clue what to expect. I’ll value your thoughts here. We’ve had a few clients play around with Facebook ads and all I see is a lot of traffic, a lot of ad spend and basically no conversions. Granted, Twitter is a very different animal and a very different market.
Hey Rae! Great post to outline the results of the study! It’s also great to see a post from you!
Interesting post, the main thing to note is a planned strategy works rather than just doing something becuase everyone else is. Loved the idea of looking at your competitors twitter accounts! I got to the post by the way as result of someone retweeting, and I will be passing the url to my IT team and I’ve retweeted, so twitter has worked for you again.
Well, this is encouraging. I have found Twitter traffic to be quite valuable as well, but yet I still haven’t spent too much energy developing a good following. Gotta get on to it!
This is really interesting information. Confirms a lot of what I think of Twitter, and gives me a lot more to think about. Thanks.
Great post, very insightful! Could I ask a question though – how do you generate the graphs of referrals from a particular source, such as Twitter? Are you using Google Analytics or some other tool?
cheers!
so I guess the question is:
With all the expense you had to incur in this endeavor (hiring a FT twitter guy, for example) was the revenue from conversions worth it? Was the ROI in line with other traffic methods like good ole fashioned link building to get organic search visitors who are known to be highly targeted?
thanks,
AL
“I can tell you that Twitter traffic converts higher than any other social network we track to date, by leaps and bounds.”
First timer, here…Interestingly enough, that quote goes against most of what I have read from “experts” about the social nets. But, having read a lot of what you have written in the past (here and other places), I believe your side of the story, without hesitation. I appreciate your honesty and directness, now and in the past, Rae.
I hate that guinea pig feeling I get from time to time…when I realize that some “experts” are only in it for themselves…”social nets suck, don’t convert, stay far, far away”.
Kudos for being genuine, sharing this with everyone and giving me some inspiration to reevaluate my efforts.
Best,
Mick
“None of our tweets were automated, not even links to our blog posts – if we didn’t feel it was worth dropping by hand, we didn’t drop it.”
I can almost hear the collective “groan” of a significant percentage of advertisers over this point.
Thanks, the analytics and figures are interesting but I think it’s an excellent case study on how to use Twitter properly to generate valuable, convertable traffic to your website.
@Jon it’s much lower than organic traffic, much higher than any other social network (for our sites).
@MB we have our own internal tracking/analytics.
@Allyn we don’t have a “full time twitter guy” – one of my marketers who has a lot of other things to do runs the account.
It is amazing how much this little tool really can help your business. It is not for every industry though. Some industry’s end up doing much better than others.
Now if only Twitter would re-implement dofollow links…
Interesting study… I’ve entertained the idea of using Twitter, but my boss is convinced that our target audience doesn’t Tweet. I wonder though- is that true? Or is he perhaps unaware of its popularity?
Social media like Twitter seems to me like a perfect market for small businesses- it provides a larger audience for much less (often, free)… What do you think?
Kim, it would depend on what you do and who your target market is.
Hey Rae,
Great, insightful post. Thanks for sharing your data.
Nikki Rae
Did you guys also manually follow all 11k+ users? If so, whoever was in charge of all that must have lost their mind by now…
PS: Mind sharing the name of the plugin you use for your social links with comments?
This is very compelling data Rae. Thank you for sharing as much as you did.
Rae, this article and the research you share is invaluable stuff. I can’t thank you enough – I’ve already sent two of my clients here since finding it yesterday, and plan to send a lot more.
I like the idea of being a BB helpdesk. That means you will get a lot of followers and manage to add a lot of links back to your site. Good thinking!!
Thanks for the info Rae.
Any thought of adding a forum to bbgeeks?
Wow, that is A LOT of traffic driven from Twitter! Good job Rae. But one thing I’m concerned about Twitter is that you get a lot of “followers” who turn out to be bots or something, and that’s very annoying!
Excellent and helpful posting Rae. We have only recently started out on Twitter but finding it good for brand promotion more than anything amongst other Twitters who have an interest in our field. I can see how it can be used to great effect for Twitter exclusive promotions and such like so currently thinking of how that could be integrated into what we do. Also read Twitter Power recently which I found immensely insightful.
Joe
Very interesting. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but Twitter is a fantastic tool if you know how to use it. My company now has multiple active Twitterers, and it has paid off big time.
This is about the only case study about Twitter that has impressed me. Sounds like you’ve figured out how to make Twitter work for you. Congratulations!
It’s always good to see opinions supported by actual numerical data – they’re worth much more than opinions based on anecdotal evidence.
I agree with Jonathan. This is the best Twitter case study I’ve ever seen. I’m impressed you’re willing to share this!
Haven’t had much luck with twitter. I’ve had some friends with much bigger twitter followings post some of my stuff on their pages and it did generate some traffic. Nothing like you have of course, but traffic is traffic. I’m going to try your techniques to increase my own followers, although my industry doesn’t translate over as well to twitter I think.
I don’t know why it took me soo long to get twitter but your absolutely right, twitter is one of my top traffic driving methods and helps my SEO out, not sure how much, but nonetheless I love it and regret not getting it sooner.