Twitter is an incredible source of targeted traffic, if you know how to use it properly.
If you’re not already aware, Digital Marketer is a data-driven online marketing company known for creating methods and techniques based on their findings..
They do a ton of testing and are quite open about it.
This means that they’re a great resource of what’s currently working in today’s marketing.
You can figure that it’s a pretty sure sign if you see Digital Marketer doing something consistently – it’s probably a validated idea.
So I took a look at their Twitter account in order to find out what they’re doing.
And by ‘a look’, I mean a hours-long, deep-dive analysis of 499 recent tweets from @DigitalMktr
First, here’s how I was able to get an inside look at the link click statistics.
Competitive Research Secret Technique With Bitly
Bit.ly is a link shortener service that gives you analytics on the links you shorten with it. It’s useful for hiding links or tracking statistics on links that you normally couldn’t track.
There’s a secret benefit for savvy marketers that most people don’t know about bitly.
You can add a “+” to the end of any bitly link and see the click statistics.
This works for any link, even if it’s not yours.
Here, try it for yourself:
Without plus: https://bitly.com/1tjMRzn
With plus: https://bitly.com/1tjMRzn+
It’s an incredible way to get insight on how a brand’s marketing efforts are going for them. I think that if more people knew about this trick, they wouldn’t use bit.ly so often.
(2020 update – it looks like you can’t do this any more with bit.ly – Bummer!)
Anyways, I started the research with Digital Marketer’s pinned lead magnet Tweet.
As you can see from the screenshot above, this bitly trick gives you all kinds of juicy information.
In the detail (click the link to see all of this) we can see that Digital Marketer got 1,154 clicks on their lead magnet from Twitter.
Now according to Ad Espresso, in 2016 the average CPC in the United States was 27 cents.
If you paid for that traffic through Facebook Advertising, that’s a whopping $311 in clicks just from Twitter users casually going through their profile.
Now this got me curious, so I went through Digital Marketer’s entire list of 499 tweets in November and pulled some numbers.
377 of those tweets included bit.ly links. It’s interesting to note that 75% of Digital Marketer’s tweets include a link.
Fortunately, they use bit.ly tracking links for all of these tweets. After some searching, I didn’t see these links used anywhere else, so we’ll assume that all of the traffic for these links is from Twitter – that’s why people use the link shorteners in the first place.
That’s a whole lot of links and data to dig through. That’s why we have coffee.
I pulled all 377 links and ran them through a duplicate line finder from Text Mechanic
This removed 256 lines, leaving us with 121 unique links tweeted through the month of November.
Digital Marketer’s Link Click Results
According to the results, the links that @DigitalMktr tweeted generated a total of 22,869 link clicks to their content.
Those link clicks have come over more time than just the last month, but the important thing to note is that all the tweets that we’re talking about were automated or scheduled and part of their content marketing campaign.
Another interesting and important thing to note is that the only tweets we found that received 0 link clicks also didn’t include an image, further proving how important it is to include some imagery in your tweets if you want results.
Digital Marketer’s Tweet Strategy Breakdown
Some of the tweets completely repeat themselves, pretty much on a monthly basis.
This is a pretty safe strategy since you can assume that nobody is going to scroll through thousands of tweets in your profile (unless you’re strange…) and the odds of someone being online to see your duplicated tweet a month later are very low.
In fact, with a bit more digging, I found that Digital Marketer has tweeted the exact same tweet on nearly a weekly basis for two years now.
This same tweet continues to give them engagement and website traffic (As we can see from the 1,203 free link clicks to the content), 131 tweets later. They’re getting retweeted as well, which probably provides additional traffic spikes.
The Lesson To Be Learned: Don’t sweat it too much.
There is a simple posting formula to follow here to get the same results, and some ways it could look if followed.
Monthly Content Tweet
Tweeting the same content monthly (If you don’t have much content to work with)
- 10 Pieces Of Content + 1 Monthly Tweet = 10 Tweets Per Month
- 30 Pieces Of Content + 1 Monthly Tweet = 30 Tweets Per Month
- 60 Pieces Of Content + 1 Monthly Tweet = 60 Tweets Per Month
- 100 Pieces Of Content + 1 Monthly Tweet = 100 Tweets Per Month
Weekly Content Tweet
Tweeting the same content weekly (Will definitely get you a lot of link clicks, but will also likely burn your followers out.)
- 10 Pieces Of Content + 1 Weekly Tweet = 40 Tweets Per Month
- 30 Pieces Of Content + 1 Weekly Tweet = 120 Tweets Per Month
- 60 Pieces Of Content + 1 Weekly Tweet = 240 Tweets Per Month
- 100 Pieces Of Content + 1 Weekly Tweet = 400 Tweets Per Month
- Alternative Daily Content Tweet (Need 5 Pieces Of Content)
This is a way to stretch out your tweets if you have around 5 pages of content to work with. This content can be a blog post, article, lead magnet, offer, or even your homepage.
Your week of tweeting would look something like this:
- Monday: Content Tweet #1
- Tuesday: Content Tweet #2
- Wednesday: Content Tweet #3
- Thursday: Content Tweet #4
- Friday: Content Tweet #5
You would simply repeat this every week. It’s easy to swap out the text to keep the tweets fresh if you have a few extra minutes.
Let’s look at some ways to quickly improve on this strategy.
How could Digital Marketer improve their Twitter strategy?
#1 – They need more engaging tweets.
Even though they have 33,000 followers (which isn’t much for a brand this large), their average tweet only gets a few likes or retweets if they’re lucky.
These tweets can be done in between the automated tweets with just a few minutes every day. They would strengthen the bond with their audience and encourage more people to tweet at them and engage for the chance to be interacted with, too.
#2 – More tweet variety.
They could tweet more industry statistics, inside shots of the DM team, and quotes to be more personable and engage more with their audience to build a relationship.
That doesn’t mean the have to stop tweeting their content, but they could tweet a relevant retweetable snippet from it instead of the simple description.
#3 – Test new tweet copy for scheduled repeat tweets.
With so much content and a good audience size to work with, it’s worth testing new tweet creatives and images to see what works best, instead of repeating the same tweets.
Digital Marketer isn’t the only company we’ve seen using this strategy. To see it in action on some other accounts, check out @Infusionsoft and yours truly, @EngageNinja.
If you’ve found this useful or have any questions, I’d love to hear about it – just drop a comment below. It will go straight to my inbox, and I read & appreciate all of the comments.
Happy Tweeting!
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