Twitter Followers & Dismal Website Activity

[datadriven]

Now that I have 500 followers and a high ratio of quality ones among them, the connected site activity is not really at all affected. While I realize this is not a big, solid following, I do think there should be some indication being given. Only occassionaly do I reference the site pages avoiding self-promotion.

What does it actually take to get followers to enter the site? It's looking like many, many thousands of normally-interested users. Even when I attempt to engage, this gets little response unless I RT. Followers simply continue to accumulate in the account on their onward crawl.

There is an overwhelming obsession now with getting ones own followers that seems to be taking over.

I'm beginning to think that, with the aims of building site activity, link building is more important, through the search engines. Of course G. seems to mainly include older established pages now which presents an obstacle as well. Pages a couple years old have a huge advantage. Isn't anybody interested in the new?

[dariussutherland]

You don't state what your site is about.

500 Twitter followers isn't going to bring a huge amount of traffic. Are these targeted followers or follow business people in the same area. If they are following you, they have to SEE things that you post and you have to engage with them. You MUST also post things Of INTEREST to them and even then it's like taking a horse to water.

Keep building your site, spreading it across various keywords, do some link building but really you just want natural looking links not blog signature or forum signatures. It just takes time, lot's of it and lots of hard work and then there is no guarentee :-)

[deadmix]

as dariuss said, 500 followers is not enough.. don't focus on that, focus on quality content which will interest people to follow you and when you will get popular then you will see and notice the traffic blowing up...

[datadriven]

.. If they are following you, they have to SEE things that you post and you have to engage with them. You MUST also post things Of INTEREST to them and even then it's like taking a horse to water.

I've built a number of sites now from scratch, on to successful, constant streams of traffic. Those however were started a number of years ago when the rules where different, before social.

This question of getting them to see things from the site -- I have been privately debating when to do it. Is it not true that you should, not repeatedly Tweet the same site link, or too often? If so, you need to decide on the optimal time. At this point I can't tell where the two graphs intersect.

These are fairly targeted followers, but there are business followers as well.

When I come across exceptional content of others, I'm happy to point it out either with a site link to them or RT. The content I offer is unique, but so far I see few others acting likewise. Not to say that they won't.

You both of course are right about content.

[Ted S]

This question of getting them to see things from the site -- I have been privately debating when to do it. Is it not true that you should, not repeatedly Tweet the same site link, or too often? If so, you need to decide on the optimal time. At this point I can't tell where the two graphs intersect.

Tweeting the same article twice is probably ok here and there but if your stream is nothing but you broadcasting yourself people will just tune you out. Remember while social is designed for participation it follows the typical 1/9/90 rule... almost everyone on twitter is essentially a lurker so if you're getting a few interactions to a 500 person tweet there's nothing strange happening.

This leads to a bigger question however... What are you tweeting? Products? Promotions? New content? People respond to what interests them and share what may interest others and that's far harder to create than you may think.