This is a guestpost from Jonny Rowntree, blogger for BreakNeckBlogger blogging about improving blog performance and metrics. More about him at the bottom.
Since I’ve been using Buffer for some time now to tweet links to my blog posts on Twitter whilst I’m away from it all, I’ve seen a dramatic increase to the visits that are related to Twitter.
Before I started using Buffer, I had to rely on the time I was available on Twitter to post links and communicate with my readers. Now I have fractioned that time by using another service in partnership with Buffer, and has been mentioned on the Buffer Blog before, Tweriod.
Here is how I focus on communicating with my readers and spend less time gathering links to post on Twitter manually.
#1 Finding your best times to Tweet
Head over to Tweroid.com and connect it to your Twitter account. Don’t worry, you won’t need any other credentials to sign up other than that. It is a super quick process. Once you’re there, leave it to scan your Twitter account and your followers timelines. This will take about an hour. After that the App will DM you with your full report.
It is worth noting here, that I strongly suggest Tweriod over other Tools that analyse your top Tweeting times. This is because only Tweriod takes into account both your and your followers past tweets. I believe this makes the most sense as other tools usually only look at your past tweets.
#2 Analysing your results
Then I went and analysed the results given by Tweriod. The graphs are very easy to understand and show you the top tweeting times at one glance. If your Twitter account is growing at a rather fast pace, it is a good idea to check back on Tweriod every now and then to see whether your results have changed.
I suggest you might also play with the different results for when followers are online the most vs. when most @mentions are received from within the Tweriod dashboard.
#3 Setting up your Buffer accordingly
Add the times given by Tweriod to your Buffer schedule. With the new Buffering patterns you can do this for each day individually for example. I then go ahead and queue up a few posts within my Buffer queue.
Here I would say, to use a ratio of 6:1 in terms of personal content and posts from others. So for every post you send out linking to one of your blogposts, send out 6 others linking to others. After leaving my tweeting like this for a week I found I got significantly different results.
While this may take a little time at first to get your Twitter account fully set up, it is a one-off time investment that paid off greatly for me. I now see around 110% more traffic coming from Twitter by using Buffer and Tweriod together compared to the 40% I was getting before I even landed on Buffer.
Ok, I hope this combination of the two tools is a useful one for you too. The best part for me is that it is still me adding tweets, instead of having everything on auto-pilot. It feels that this makes a big difference for my followers.
Do you think this technique could be a useful one for you too? Do you have any different ideas on how to increase people visiting your site from Twitter in a genuine way?
Photocredit: Horia Varlan, pitbull2013
About the author: Jonny is a student blogger residing in Newcastle, UK. He is a performance nerd and blogs about how his readers can get their blog fast on BreakNeckBlogger.com. Jonny is interested in startups and can be found interviewing entrepreneurs over on StartupStori.es. Find him on Twitter as @atjonny.
Interested in writing a guestpost for the Buffer blog? Send me an email to leo@bufferapp.com
