March 9, 2009

Why I love Social Media (Traffic spike!)

3-4 weeks ago now I wrote a Squidoo lens titled ‘How to add your LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and forgot about it. Last week I decided to check in on how it was going – around 20 uniques visitors per day. Then I searched Google for keywords, including ‘how to add LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and ‘how do I add my LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and noticed the lens was ranked #1. I had written an update version so thought, why not post it on my blog to help promote it?.

I did just that. I put a link at the top of the old lens informing people of the changes and linking them to the new resource, Tweeted the update to my followers (around then 1,800ish) and left.

12 hours later the article generated around 180 uniques! Looking at the traffic stats in Google Analytics I can see that Twitter referred over half the traffic, the Squidoo lens sent its fair share and I had a single hit from Delicious – somebody bookmarked me. 24 hours later Delicious hits have grown to near 25% of the traffic and continue on an upwards tend. I’ve also noticed a few smaller bookmarking sites referring me traffic. The traffic was clearly qualified too – with my Bounce rate going from 71% down to 42% and the LinkedIN / Twitter guide being the most viewed page here!

That is just a little story I wanted to share. It was just an innocent attempt on my part to drive a little more traffic here and begin to consolidate my articles. I did not really promote the change at all. For a simple blog article I think the traffic generated was phenomenal and it just goes to show what all of these websites can really do for your traffic – even if you did not mean for it to happen!