Wednesday, March 07, 2012

How I Used Twitter to get 91,000 People to Look at Me



 Last month I uploaded a post about "A Year of Selling Ebooks" (read it here, it'll change your life!). It was my 3rd most popular post. As per my usual modus operandi, I posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Here is the tweet that I came up with for twitter:

"Well, I've been selling ebooks for a year. Here are my stupendous results! ow.ly/95zkC #kindle #amwriting #kobo RT plz"

I tweeted variations on this message over three days adding in different hashtags so that it would be visible to various groups. I also used an "owly" link so I could track how many people clicked on that specific link and what countries they were from. I do keep track of stats just so I can get a general impression of what sort of impact my posts are having. It's impossible to know how many people saw this tweet but I did keep track of how many people retweeted it. It was retweeted 46 times by other twitter people (you have my eternal gratitude). And it reached:

 91,000 people! That's 182, 000 eyeballs!

Well, that's how many people were following the various people who were kind enough to retweet my tweets. As we all know only a small percentage of them would see the tweet and an even smaller percentage would click on the link. The results that I could measure were that I had around 3000 hits on my Blogspot blog. I also sold 20 or so books on Amazon in the space of those few days (it was only selling 5 or so in the same time period before I did my blitz). And I gained about a hundred twitter followers.

Was it worthwhile? Absolutely. It got my name out there a bit further. It's proof to me that what people are looking for is information, not so much "sales" (my tweets with a more direct "buy my book" message get very few hits). And having new followers is always invaluable.

 Art

P.S. I bet you're dying to know what my 2nd most popular post was. Well it was: How to Write Novels and Lose Weight.
P.P.S And my most famous post is... Treadmill Desk: How to Make Millions and Write More  Weird what you become popular for, eh?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised "How to Write Novels and Lose Weight" wasn't number one. I'll have to try your strategy and see what happens. :)

mistuh_d said...

Be careful with extrapolating stats, Art. You can't ruled out the odd one-eyed man among your clickers. ;-)

Anonymous said...

That's fascinating as always, Arthur.

Anonymous said...

Arthur, I have passed on the Liebster Blog Award to you. Please see my blog for more info. I hope you don't mind. :)