I’m rubbish at promoting my blog on social media. There, I said it. Mainly because I’m mostly only active on Twitter with regard to the topics on the blog. I rarely update Facebook anymore, and keep my Instagram for private life stuff. I tried Pinterest before, but didn’t get a lot of traction. So the extent of plugging my blog on social was tweeting out links to my content with a short tweet or two. My focus from a traffic acquisition perspective on the blog was mainly via SEO. But recently, one of my tweets linking out to a blog post got picked up and retweeted by a celebrity with 1.4M followers, and I wanted to share the impact that retweet had on traffic to my blog.
My social media baseline
Before I go into the tweet that blew up, I want to establish what the baseline for my usual social media traffic is, on Google Analytics. As you can see in the graph below, my typical social traffic lies between 130 – 180 users per month from May to August.
This mainly comes from me tweeting out links to my articles, and perhaps some visits from new followers curious about my content.
In September, that number spiked because of 1 particular tweet, and currently stands at 853 users for the month.
So, which tweet created this magic?
The tweet that blew up on Twitter
This tweet below (where I wrote about how Jim Cramer compared gold to a typewriter when talking about bitcoin) was the one that blew up on Twitter. By blew up, I mean it had 91 likes and 21 retweets. Yup, my bar is set pretty low.
BUT! It doesn’t matter that only 21 people retweeted me, because all I needed was one whale. And that one whale in this instance, was none other than Jim Cramer himself!
Let’s break down the numbers a little more. This tweet had about 93,860 impressions, and a total of 1,858 clicks, of which 826 were link clicks to the blog content.
Just for context, I’ve also put up a screenshot below to show the typical numbers my tweets on its own would garner. They range anywhere between 100 – 1200 impressions.
Engaging with celebrities on Twitter
With this in mind, my Twitter strategy moving forward will be to try and identify celebrities who engage and retweet their followers, and start to engage a lot more with them, in the right and appropriate context, and aim for a mega retweet a month, to try and replicate the September numbers.
Another case in point to support this.
This particular quote tweet of mine received 12,922 impressions. Did you know why?
Cos it got both the Winklevosses to like the tweet!
Twitter Analytics
If you’re interested in digging into the weeds of your twitter activity to see what tweets are interesting, you should totally check out your twitter analytics stats.
Once you’re in there, you can have a view of your individual tweet statistics, as well as the aggregate performance over the last 28 days, and a month by month summary of your account.
You can even export your tweet data onto a CSV file to model your own data so you can slice and dice it whichever way you feel like.