[This is part of a series of posts — see the Introduction if you haven’t already.]
If a lone wolf howls in the jungle, does anybody hear?
The signal to noise problem works in reverse as well. I currently have just over 400 followers. Most of them found and followed me for some reason. There are probably less than 10% of them that followed me after I followed them. I would like to think that most of them followed me because the saw something in my profile or the tweet stream that they enjoyed. However, I know that a large number of them followed me just so that I’d follow them back. Still, there should be some that are looking for my updates once in a while. Yet it appears that my tweets are getting lost in the noise.
I see very little traffic to my blogs and web sites when I tweet about them. Also, I have asked technical questions about WordPress and other stuff, most of which is unanswered. It’s not that people are ignoring me — well, not completely 8=). It’s just that the chances of people seeing my stuff is too low.
I joined Twitter for a number of reasons. Generating a bit of traffic was one of them and, so far, I’ve not seen the kind of traffic that I’m hoping for. Perhaps I need a bigger following for this to happen. I had expected that maybe 1% of my followers might see and follow a link I post to my sites. Of those, I would hope for a couple of RT’s and more traffic. I have no way of knowing whether people follow my links to other sites (and I really am not concerned enough to use the tools to track that). But I do know that I have very little response to tweets about my own stuff.
Sometimes it’s just too noisy for the LoneWolf’s howls to break through.
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Tags: being heard, frustrations, Twitter
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I’m sorry you are not having much success with getting targeted followers, and I agree with most of the shortcomings you’ve listed (starting work on a Twitter client to fix some of them, and others I’ve noticed). It can be difficult to get your links seen – timing is key, as is great copywriting in 140 characters. I’ve posted some advanced Twitter techniques here:
5 Advanced Twitter Tips
I get 5-10% Click Through Rate from Twitter, and Twitter is my #2 traffic source behind search traffic (all this, and over 1000 targeted followers in my first 2 months without automation). There is also an earlier post about blog marketing linked that should help.
Please feel free to DM or use the contact form at the blog if you have any questions or just want to say hello.
Thanks @absurd_human (aka Peter). I checked out your post and there is some good advice there (although there are 7 tips — maybe 2 of them aren’t advanced 8=).
It would be nice to see 5% or more click through. I’ve been looking at other techniques to try and I’m going to be experimenting more with hashtags, especially with my golf and humour blogs — I’ll probably have to spell humour the American way to get hits though 8=)