Who says you can’t use Twitter for business?
There are still a *lot* of people that I speak to who don’t get Twitter. They don’t know how to use it to get the best from it and they definitely don’t see any use for it in business. However it can be a huge source of traffic if you do it right.
The above pie chart shows the split of all traffic sources to my new site ShareMyPlaylists.com that I launched just over a week ago. As an experiment I used Twitter as part of the launch plan, to see if indeed it could bring me relevant traffic. The biggest source of my traffic (64.70%) is from direct referrals, people who have bookmarked the site or just type in the URL. The second biggest source of traffic however is Twitter, at almost 10%. Result.
I’ll share my findings in more detail along with how I used Twitter to bring in the traffic, in a more detailed post at a later date. For now though, I just wanted to demonstrate that Twitter can be good for business. 
What I’m listening to right now: Modern Soul 2
Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 9:32 am and is filed under Blogging, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I am the founder of ShareMyPlaylists.com, ContentNow.co.uk and some other businesses. I thought it would be fun to blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
Thanks Kieron, this is really quite insightful; the more I talk to various people around the industry, the more buzz that seems to follow Twitter. In addition to discussing how you used Twitter to generate this traffic, I would be very interested to know how you built up your follower base on Twitter. Thx!
No problem Jason, I’ll be sure to cover that off in a future blog post.
Scary thing is I found out about this blog post from a Retweet.
I have been signed up to twitter for a couple of years, but only in the last few weeks have I really tried to make it work for my online businesses.
Like most social media outlets you need to understand your market. Most social media does not work with mainstream markets.
However if you can pick up the niches where users reside on twitter. Twitter can be a powerful tool.
Yes, i’m one of “those” who just don’t get twitter. Well, after reading this, after opened an account and I’ll definitely spend abit of time on it. Thanks
Glad to see you joined Twitter today Joe!
Kieron. Just an addition to your post. Moneyweek just published an article about Twitter and Small biz that u may find interesting. http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=64679&d=254&h=5&f=3&nl=BN&ln=17030905
That’s interesting piece of information regarding traffic from twitter. Will definitely try to use twitter in my own promotion strategies.
you did get a re-tweet from the official Spotify twitter which must have helped
Indeed I did, and ReTweeting is an important part of marketing via Twitter, It will all be in a future post.
hope you dont mind but im going to give it a go.
have you had good results with the advert banner you have put on spotify?.
Is there any reason why you went with just a banner and didnt get a voice over artist. as i usually have spotify minimised and it was just by change i opened the program up to see your banner for a second before it went off. but if it was a audio advert i woudnt have missed it.
its the same price for a audio advert as the banner. ive been qouted £50 for a 30 second voice over job.
but i cant decide if i should throw the money into seo instead.
I’ve never really looked at twitter, but you have certainly peaked my interest in it now. Time for a look I think.
I think twitter works for anything right now. For a business to optimise the potential it should be ready to sacrifice time online.
@Trevor I’ll suggest you look into SEO as posts on twitter are also picked up by Google.
Looking fwd to hearing more, Kieron!
My own Spotify-related blog sees a massive surge in interest whenever it’s mentioned on Spotify’s own blog (23% of all visitors), however Twitter referrals only amount for about 2% of my incoming traffic to date. Granted I don’t do too much re-tweeting (I’m probably too cautious not to annoy followers by repeating myself too often), and the only incentive I have to offer is an opinion (your voucher promotion was genius btw
Congrats on the fast uptake: I’ve been monitoring Spotify playlist sites for a few weeks now and sharemyplaylists is definitely the fastest growing (even if it is the slowest site to load ;). Obviously your strategy (and budget) is clearly bringing visitors in.
Would be interesting to hear how you plan to recoup your costs: the ads you currently have seem to be all just back to Spotify, so I wouldn’t expect too much click-thru as users will already have Spotify?
Thanks for your comments, I’m really happy with the rate at which the site is growing, its certainly surpassed my expectations. With regards to monetisation, at the moment I’m doing it purely out of love. In time as the user base grows I will look to monetise it, but not just yet
The next big thing is definitely about collecting and analyzing the sentiment of crowds, twitter and facebook are the big consumer internet wins.
The biggest source of my traffic (64.70%) is from direct referrals, people who have bookmarked the site or just type in the URL. The second biggest source of traffic however is Twitter, at almost 10%. Result.
Hey Kieron, to put things into greater perspective it might be good to see that charted up against time spent on each channel. I’m not saying this is the cast but if somebody were to spend 50% of their time marketing on twitter but it delivered 10% of their traffic they may be better marketing elsewhere and vice versa. Hope that makes sense.
Cheers
Paul
Hi Paul, yes makes absolute sense. In short though the only marketing I have done really is create a blog post here (15 mins) and every day I maybe spend 10 minutes managing the @sharemyplaylist Twitter account by answering Tweets and generally chatting.
Sounds like you’re on to a winner. Congrats!
10 minutes a day ain’t bad at all! 15 minutes to create a blog post is good going however. Is this your usual turnaround time or was this an exeption, Kieron?
Hi Kieron
Im fairly ambivalent about twitter but how about a post about the real ‘elephant in the room’.
the fact that despite all their posturing towards the end of last year the affiliate compoanies are doing absolutely nothing to clamp down on all the voucher code sites who have reverted to the exact same practices that were supposed to be forbidden.
‘Click to reveal’ is now the norm again for the usual suspects and the rewards for playing by the rules are………
none really. This is a blog about affiliate marketing so perhaps a post about the fact that basically the affiliate networks hahave not followed through on this at all?
lawrence
Twitter has become so popular in short span! Good to read your article that it can also be used ‘improve’ traffic to websites!!
Yeah people are using Twitter services to promote their company;I have seen it at many places.
So what kind of numbers does the chart represent?
9% out of 100 visitors does not make Twitter an effective marketing tool. 9% of 100.000 does.
it depends on how much followers you have , because if you just starter i don’t think that you can collect much followers and if you do this i don’t think that you can gain them trust on you .. just need time and a good tweets .
Hi Keiron,
I’m one of the people you mention that just doesn’t get Twitter, so it’s interesting to see that it does actually work.
Any chance you’ll have a full article up about how you used it?
Ok - while waiting for your follow up article on Twitter I’ve taken the plunge and joined it!
http://twitter.com/123PriceCheck
I’m not sure yet exactly how to best use it. Regularly posting good DVD/CD/book deals is one thing I plan on doing. Also, when merchants send out notices of sales or offers. Though I want to balance it so I’m not sending out too many of these tweets!
I’ve also added a link on all my pages for people to follow me, though have no idea how many people (a) use Twitter and (b) will want to follow me!
I could also do with starting a blog and tweets could be a good way of letting people know when a new post has been made.
I’m not sure yet whether this is another thing that I will end up spending time on that doesn’t achieve a lot, or whether it’ll be useful in promoting my site!
Further to my earlier post, yes, I too was one of those that didnt get it. But Kieron’s article made me seriously rethink this. So far, in the last 3 weeks, made 28 updates and got 35 followers. Not great, but an OK start since I hardly spend any time on this.
http://twitter.com/MyEggNest
To get followers, I use two methods. The first simple approach was to follow people in a similar field, in my case, parents with young children, then start following their followers. So I’ve had a 60% follow rate. Secondly, I use the “yellow pages of twitter” (their slogan) called Twellow.com. Here you can find followers based on specific categories, i,e. Babies, Finance, Music, Design, Painting etcc…. Hope this helps. Anyone has other recommendations, please feel free to help us novices out.
Thanks Joe - I found a few new people with Twellow. Well, I found some companies in the same sort of field and then followed some of their followers!
Another tool I found that I thought I’d share is http://www.tweetsmarter.com - it allows you to easily add a link on the end so that people can easily retweet your tweet just by clicking it.