Twitter link bait - Is it worth it?

I've just finished reading Lindsay Camp's "Can I Change Your Mind", a book on the art (or science as Mr. Camp infers) of persuasive writing.

Sadly, due to my inability to retain any information, you will see no improvement in my writing style.

That said, the book was excellent and I would recommend anyone, who writes anything at all, to read it.

In the vain of persuasive writing, actually it was just the natural title, I wrote a "What now for Twitter" article and tweeted it for the twitterverse to read.

It seemed to register a bit of a link bait value, as with in moments I'd received a large number of click-through's to the Digital Signals post.

I rarely get visits from my own tweeting of URL's, I'm far too minor in the twitterverse to hold much stature, and Digital Signals is a little known blog published by some odd ball northerner, muttering about communication, semantic nonsense and digital project management.

Moving away from the dose of self depreciation, the visitors kept coming and my site had one of the highest visitor surges it had ever experienced in a day come midnight.

Reviewing the visitors the following day though wasn't as rewarding as I'd hoped. The bounce rate was high. I suspect most were hoping to read breaking news regarding Twitter's future owner.

Visitor time was short. After they'd realised their was no real exclusive news to share with the rest of the twitterverse, people quickly moved on.

So what had I gained?

I doubt many of the visitors have became regular readers following the post, but perhaps some minor exposure was achieved.

Nothing had been lost really, I wasn't misleading anyone.

But from a slightly leading link referring to the beloved Twitter application I'd obviously hit a nerve and attracted interests, however transient that interest was.

At the end of the day, it wasn't quite the quality readership for Digital Signals's quality content I was hoping to get, but it obviously ticked the persuasive boxes.

I've been slowly trying evolve my Twitter posts that lead to my blog into more inquisitive tweets, in the hope of attracting more readers. Now I'd achieved this, almost accidentally, but what impact has it had on my regular readership numbers?

What I've learnt over the time I've been writing Digital Signals, attracting more readers to your blog is a slow process. This can only genuinely be achieved when you have a substantial body of good content for people to find by themselves.

For me, tweeting my posts has very little effect on my site traffic (I'm not claiming that this is the same for other blogs); search, bookmarking and information sharing portals such as Twine have a far greater input to my site traffic.

I'd been reading "The problem with social media", and while having some empathy with the post, I didn't fully agree.

In this case, I'd not been looking for an answer to a question, but instead encouraging an action. This didn't, however, confirm any of my disagreements with the above article, it just created another mostly unrelated question.

I'd be interested to know what percentage of the big Twitter users followers click a link they post in comparison to the percentage of my followers that click my tweeted links.

My reason for using Twitter still remains the community engagement and the interaction I get with like-minded people, rather than the facility to drive traffic to specific links.

I'll probably post this article with an equally leading but appropriate link. It will be interesting to see how many people make it to this last sentence this time.

If you do, leave a comment and let me know how much of your traffic is generated via Twitter.


Related reading:

The problem with social media for most people - #comments http://comments.deasil.com/2009/04/10/the-problem-with-social-media-for-most-people/

Quality not quantity - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/quality-not-quantity.html

What now for Twitter - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/what-now-for-twitter.html

In support of Twitter - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/01/in-support-of-twitter.html

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