0

0

A while back we added Twitter integration to our IndexItem module for DNN. Anytime an article, audio, image, video, or other media is submitted to II, if you have added your Twitter credentials to "Social Networking Accounts", it will post on your behalf to Twitter. So, I have been posting quite a bit in the last couple of months and have noticed a trend. Consistently, any post I make with a pound sign (#) in the Title will immediately and permanently get more traffic.

Now I do not have a lot of followers, mainly because I post boring development related articles...or maybe its because people think I am an asshole... Anywho, it is obvious how much of a difference simply adding #keyword into the status (or Title in II) affects the traffic of your post.

A couple of hours ago, I posted 2 videos of last weeks Michigan versus Notre Dame game where a ND player recieves a uppercut from a Michigan Player. The 2 articles were exactly the same, except for the title of the item. First I posted the article without # usage, then the one with. Notice the results after 1 minute of posting the one that did use #:

After 1 minute of posting the second video, it has a higher rank based on the total number of view, while the 1st post had 8 minutes more exposure time. On my limited amount of followers, the results are quite interesting. Sorry if you feel violated because you were unwittingly part of my experiment, but like I said, I'm an asshole....maybe not as big as one as Jonas Mouton in the video. Anyway, read on...

Now, lets look at some of the Twitter real time searhc results around 30 minutes of exposure. For the first search, lets look #michigan

Almost 30 minutes after submitting the article, my post on twitter still shows up as the 2nd search result for #michigan. My first post is not on the list.

After 30 minutes of exposure for the query of just michigan I finally see this after expanding the results twice (Twitter's version of paging):

And further down the list is my first post without # usage, essentially buried in the real time results.

As I write this, at a little over 2 hours, the #keyword post has 14% more traffic. While that is certainly not substantial with my limited traffic, it is quantifiable.

So, what does all this mean? Well, the nature of Twitter search results is all based on Time. The more popular a keyword, your 15 minutes...i mean 15 seconds...in the spotlight of Twitter is short lived. You do not get a lot of long term link juice from Twitter, but using #keyword definitely attributes to more traffic and longer exposure in Twitter real time search results. Another benefit of using #keyword is that you get traffic from people performing search for the keyword AND from people clicking on the auto-links in their post when they use #keyword. 

In conclusion, if you are gonna Tweet for traffic, pound away at it!