Few years back, search engine traffic (organic) was the main source of traffic for most blogs. But everything has changed. Now social media has become one of the main sources of traffic for many bloggers and Twitter is one among the best to drive traffic.
With hundreds of millions of registered users on Twitter, it has become one of the best places to drive traffic from. My blog is not getting too much of traffic from Google as this blog is only a few weeks old.
Take a look at the chart below showing the % of traffic from different sources my blog receives and you can see that most of the traffic comes from Twitter.
How To Drive Plenty Of Traffic From Twitter?
When I created my first blog few years back, I thought Twitter was not important and it can’t drive traffic to your blog. The funny part is I didn’t know how to use it and was not interested to learn because I was a Facebook addict those days.
But now my thoughts have changed. I’m an active Twitter user now and I’m receiving loads of traffic from Twitter and if you are finding difficulty in driving traffic from Twitter, then read on. Twitter traffic is highly targeted and you can get more comments on your blog.
1) Get more targeted followers
Everywhere you might have heard people say “Targeted Traffic” or “Targeted Followers”. Simply it’s “People with interests like yours”.
Imagine your interests are Cricket or Tennis. Would you find it interesting if I keep on talking about Football? No right? It’s the same everywhere. Even on Twitter! Your followers will find your tweets useful only if it’s of their interest.
You cannot always tweet according to your followers’ interest. So it’s always better to follow people on Twitter who would find your Tweets useful.
How to get more followers?
I have talked about getting more targeted followers above but you might have a question in mind – “How to get more followers?”.
Okay! I’ll answer that too.
Follow more people – Choose a person’s account whose interests are like yours and start following his/her followers. If your blog is about Blogging, then you can follow my followers because there are great chances of people following you back.
Be Active On Twitter – It’s very important to remember you are active on Twitter, if you want to get more followers. It’s not only in the case of Twitter, it’s true even on Facebook, G+ and every other social network. So start tweeting right now and reply to other’s tweets.
Here is a good article which tells the top ways to get more targeted followers fast.
2) Tweet at proper time
No Twitter user can stay online 24/7. Different people use Twitter at different times. So not all your Tweets would get maximum exposure.
So how to know when my followers come online? Got this question in your mind? Okay! There are few tools that you could use to find when your followers use Twitter the most.
Looks cool right? You can use Tweriod, TweetStats or TweetReport for this. My followers are most active from 9 PM to 4 AM.
3) Use Twitter buttons on your blog
Using tweet buttons along with other social buttons on your blog is highly recommended. If you are not using it, then this is the right time to start using it.
It’s effective because it is the easiest way people can share your blog posts on Twitter. Do you think a person would go to his Twitter account, type a title of your post, go to bitly or goo.gl to shorten the url, post the tweet just to share your content? NO!
That’s why you should make use of tweet buttons on your blog because your readers can share the content on few clicks.
4) Make use of hash tags (#)
Use hash tags when you tweet because people would find your tweet when they search for it.
Hash tags are like keywords that you use for SEO. But don’t overuse hash tags as it can look spammy.
Read : How to find the best hashtags for your tweets?
5) Retweet other’s tweets
Promoting your product or content is fine but it’s also very important to RT (Retweet) other’s tweet.
If you RT others tweets actively, then you can expect them to do the same. Some may either thank you for the RT or in come cases RT your tweets too.
The more followers your followers have, the more traffic you get when they RT your tweets. So it’s always better to have people following you with high number of followers.
6) Use tools to automate tweets
You can get traffic to your old blog posts by automating tweets. There are many tools out there which you can use for this purpose.
Tweetily (WordPress Plugin)
Tweet Old Post (WP Plugin)
I used to get decent traffic from Twitter when I used to Tweet manually. But when I started to use these automation tools, traffic from Twitter increased to a large extent.
So I recommend using these tools because these are the best ways to promote old posts on your blog that can no longer be found on the homepage of your blog.
Your Thoughts
I’ve already told that my blog receives plenty of traffic from Twitter. If you are not using it, then start using it right now. Many top bloggers claim over half of their traffic is referred by Twitter.
Are you an active user of Twitter? How many visitors does Twitter send you everyday? Please let me and others know your thoughts on this.
Awesome article bro thanks for sharing huge and useful stuff !
Hello again bro! This is the longest post written by me.
awesome bro keep it going ! long posts are good for SEO
Hi Thejas. thumbs up the great post… specially i liked the mention of hash tags. I was missing those…. will definitely use them in future…
Using hash tags can increase traffic from Twitter as it will appear in the search results.
Cheers for the comment!
Excellent article, Thejas. At first, I was also a fan of Facebook and did not attach much importance to Twitter, but now I spend the same timeon Twitter that I spend on Facebook. I use Tweet Old Post and Hootsuite.
Hello Juan,
Thank You! Looks like we have a similar story.
Are you receiving any traffic from Twitter?
great post really i got few new points from it, and will try them, at the moment i am not recieving any traffic from twitter, and niether i am active there.
Hello bro,
If you are not using Twitter, then I’d suggest you to go and join right now. There’s a plenty of traffic in there which you can easily drive towards your blog.
Good post on traffic generation through twitter and very well written!!
Following u on twitter!!
Thank you for the comment and follow.
I use Twitter occasionally. But this post encourage me to focus more on Twitter to get more traffic.
I gotta focus on fb, twitter and G+ along with guest posts. Thanks for your suggestion Thejas
Twitter is great for driving traffic and I do think that you should focus more on Twitter.
One more reason why I don’t like to use FB because I waste lots of time there by chatting with people, sometimes even strangers.
On twitter action is required if we want to convince others….without our own action we cannot get reaction…which is very important.
Hey Thejas,
Great tips.
Do you have any resource that would give you the most recent and most popular hashtags used on twitter. ?
cheers
Akos
Hello Akos,
Thank you.
Mostly I use #blogging on Twitter when I tweet something related to my blog. But that wouldn’t work for every blog.
I think you would find this useful. Check out http://goo.gl/F7RTL.
Thank You
Thejas
completely agree with you , twitter is the most underrated social networking site by newbies .Thanks for sharing
True..It’s very difficult to understand and another reason I was not active on Twitter few years back because I found none my friends there.
I hope you get an affialiate commission from this iunfollow tool. I just purchased the service and this thing rock.
Overall, I am impress by the quality of the content, the writing and how easy it is to navigate your site.
Let’s reconnect soon
Hello,
Thank you, but at this time I have not joined any partnership program with them. So I’m not getting any commissions.
its very informative and interesting. it will defiantly helps for SMM expert
I’ve used most of the tips you suggest for gaining traffic from Twitter.
Most success: with using buttons at my blogs and using hashtags.
Well written article!
Hey DeeJay,
Using Social buttons and widgets on blog makes it easy for readers to share the content with their friends. So one must always use social plugins on their blog.
Good post by you Thejas! Really i don’t know some of the ways which you specified here to drive traffic.
I knew few things and gonna follow the remaining missed ways to generate huge traffic from twitter.
Nice post in simple words, thanks for writing and sharing!
Hello!
Twitter is one of the best sources of traffic if used properly.
Are you an active Twitter user?? If you are not then I’d suggest you to being active!!
Getting more retweets actually makes every blogger happy. Retweeting others posts is truly an ideal way of getting more retweets.
I also do use other platforms.
I hope to get enough time to tweet about my blog posts because after writing and then doing its marketing along with my development stuff that I do for a living. I hardly have any energy left even to tweet 10 words. But automating it would be easy.
Are there any guidelines for tweeting old posts? Like how often you can do that? Do you have to say it’s a past post?
Hello Barb,
That totally depends on you Barb. But make sure you don’t post SIMILAR tweets too often. I don’t think you should say it’s a past post unless its a PAST NEWS article!
Experiment with different Tweet frequencies until you find one that works the best for you. I hope this has helped!
Thank you!
~Thejas
So if I only have a few followers but hundreds of tweets daily from other people, do I just tweet back to them?
Hello Jennifer!
I don’t clearly understand your question. If you were asking me whether you should retweet all tweets from other people, then my answer is NO! You need not do that. Select best tweets that you think your followers would find useful and retweet them.
Tweet, Retweet and talk to others on Twitter. Be active and you should see new followers.
If that wasn’t your question, then please let me know.
Thank You
~Thejas
One more un common way to get more traffic from twitter is to add commentluv premium ,becuase it encourage more twitter shares at the time of adding comments by the commenters. Thanks.
Ohh yeah! I didn’t mention about that in the post because I wasn’t using CommentLuv Premium at the time of publishing the post. Now I’m using it CommentLuv premium and it’s working great.
Thank you!
Hi Thejas, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic. I totally agree with you on automation, I use tools myself and live an easier life now!
I also see the problem of timing when it comes down to publishing, but the difficulty here is, that you may have a multinational following who are active 24/7 due to time zones. Withou automation you wouldn’t be able to spread your tweets properly I gues…
I’ll be sure to check out your blog to see if there are some new tips in future and I’m now off to rummage through your other articles
Hello Robert,
Yeah, that’s why social automation have gained popularity over a short period of time. They are used by most bloggers including me.
Can I know which social tools you use to automate social sharing? Can you tell me your experience with it?
I hope to see you here again, Robert! Cheers.
Thank You
Very nice buddy, I really like that you shown a better method of using twitter for promoting our blogs online. Thanks for sharing with us.
I’m glad you liked this post.
Twitter is one of the best places to promote your blog and drive traffic to your blog.
Hi Thejas,
I use Buffer for scheduling in combination with Tweriod for optimal timing. I use Tweet Adder for building my Twitter following and mention to keep track of whos saying what about me on Twitter (and other networks).
Experience throughout positive.
Check Triberr. You will like it a lot if you like promotion via Twitter.
well i m getting traffic from t.co (twitter) but i dont know how…is there a way to check out who has retweeted my post?
Twitter is big and well as one of the most powerful social media tools, i believe everyone should use it. Amazing post. Thanks for sharing
Good article on how to increase the traffic on blog.Looking forward to use it
If you understand Twitter properly and follow the methods above, you will see plenty of traffic from Twitter on your blog.
Interesting post Thejas,
Twitter is a top social networking site to promote your post and business and i strongly believe most of the people are using it.Thanks for the talking about hashing tag.
Glad you liked the post, Andrew. Thank you for commenting here. I hope you’ll visit us again.
Awesome guide, I am following almost many points and in your post I got some extra knowledge.