I will never forget the day that I forgot to schedule tweets. It started out as a typical day. Before going to school, I always check my statistics. I look at how many Twitter followers I gain, how many eBook sales I make, and my blog’s statistics as well. I happened to notice on one day that my blog only got 50 views at 7:30 am.
Since my blog tends to have more than 100 views at this time, I looked through my statistics to see if I could identify the problem. The problem was that I was not getting nearly as many visitors from Twitter as I normally got. I decided to look at my tweets thinking that I somehow forgot the link to my blog posts in those tweets or something along those lines. However, I quickly realized that I had not scheduled any tweets for the day. For the first time in several months (or maybe even a year), I had no scheduled tweets on HootSuite.
Here come the lessons. The first thing I took advantage of was HootSuite Pro. As a member, I knew the ropes well enough to schedule 24 tweets in 1 minute. Although I could not schedule any tweets in the morning, I had all of my tweets lined up from the afternoon and on.
This experience allowed me to deeply understand how important Twitter, and social media in general, is for my strategy. On that day, my blog got over 350 views because Twitter was able to kick in and save the day. However, I was able to get an idea of what traffic would look like without my social networks. Search engine traffic also contributed towards my blog’s increase in traffic, but the reason I get a lot of traffic from search engines is because of my social networks in the first place.
The big lesson is to never forget about your social networks. Although there may be some days when you do not feel like scheduling tweets or putting that pin up on Pinterest, continuing to use social networks will ultimately grow your presence in a big and powerful way. I was putting in the same amount of hours on Twitter back when I had 2,000 followers (also because I needed more time to learn and utilize cool tools) as I do now (now I gain more than 2,000 followers every 4 days).
Never forget your social networks. They have the power to put you on the map and get people to talk about you.
Great information! Most of my “working” hours as a business owner are spent networking on social media and it definitely pays off. I need to invest in a pro version of an auto-tweet program, I suppose. Currently using Tweet Jukebox free version.
I am happy to hear that you are looking at the pro version. I don’t use Tweet Jukebox, but you are learning now that it is better to pay some money to save extra time for yourself. The way you repurpose that time can potentially lead to a profit.
Interesting article Marc. Would you be able to share any details about your sources of traffic and what type of campaigns are working for you?
Twitter is my major source of traffic. I tweet every 15 minutes and see which of my tweets my followers engage with the most. Based on what they engage with the most, I can discover what I want. Then I simply give them more of what they want.
Hey Marc, great information. I am just new to the whole social media practice not having had any need previously. I am learning from you that nothing beats good content and that I must work Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and other media to get my message out there.
Thanks for all your sharing.
Greg
Greg, I am very happy to hear that. Thanks for coming by and sticking around. You rock!