If first you don’t succeed…

I actually joined Twitter last December, found two friends on it, followed them, and promptly forgot about it. Seems like they did too. In fact, I saw a statistic recently (and I now can’t find where) that said that something like 60% of people who joined Twitter left within a month (I’m paraphrasing and possibly mis-remembering, but it was along those lines anyway… a big percentage). I had become part of that majority.

… try again

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it another try, and this time spent a little bit of effort learning about how it worked – what did @ronanpalliser mean, what was a DM, a RT, a follower. And I began to form an opinion of it that where Facebook was for friends, Twitter was for people with common interests, be they friends or strangers, and in fact it wasn’t creepy to follow people you didn’t know (or them to follow you) – it was kind of the point.

It helped that I found some photographers on it who inspire me, educate me, amaze me and entertain me on a regular basis – step forward @strobist, @chasejarvis, @chromasia @JoeMcNallyPhoto (amongst others). Now here was a way for me to connect with them and get a little more insight into their world beyond what their blogs offered.

This is all for free so I thought, what harm… let’s persist a little with it this time.

Twitter as a marketing tool

Within a few days @chromasia announced a competition on Twitter for his followers – he asked a question with the answer buried in his blog, set a deadline a few days away, and offered lifetime membership of his Photoshop tutorials as a prize. Value to the winner – about EUR100. Cost to him: close to zilch. Benefit to him: lots of new followers and probably new readers, and maybe even new sales. Having never even considered buying a lifetime membership of his PS tutorials, I found myself wanting to win.

After a successful stint photographing the Volvo Ocean Race in Galway I had received lots of enquiries about buying prints on my site, and so had researched a pricing scheme that was fair to me and the purchaser. So here I was with a blog that had a link to buy prints, a twitter account that was looking for followers, and an idea planted by a fellow tweep.

“Borrowing” a good idea

I decided to take inspiration from @chromasia, and put a competition on my blog and linked to it from the following tweet:

WIN a framed photograph of your choice (worth EUR75) from Dublin-based photographer Ronan Palliser – http://bit.ly/6xdFU

At the same time a twitter aggregator (@happn_in_dublin) was doing an offer on advertising slots where they would tweet an ad to their 1476 followers once a day. I signed up for it for the next 6 days, using credits that they gave me for signing up, and set my ad to the same tweet.

The campaign begins

That was Friday 3rd July. I had about 20 followers on Twitter. After 3 months of blogging, traffic to my blog was growing steadily, but down a little from the peak of early June after the Galway Advertiser had published a full page of my photos with my website URL as the credit.

Straight away a friend retweeted to his 95 followers, and later on a follower retweeted to his 510 followers. 6 hours into my 10 day campaign and my tweet stood to be seen by up to 625 people. 30 times more than my own followers. Already I was seeing the potential.

On Saturday my @happn_in_dublin ad campaign started and I let that run on Saturday and Sunday with no tweeting by me or retweeting by followers to gauge the impact. Within 3 days traffic on my blog was up 50%.

The campaign picks up speed

On Monday, it kicked off properly. Internet guru @damienmulley retweeted my tweet, as did 2 other followers, and 2 people who were following them. My degrees of seperation were growing. That took my tweet to 4000 tweeps on that day alone, and that didn’t include the 1500 who saw the @happn_in_dublin ad or the retweet of it.

Tuesday I let things alone and let the ad do its thing, and on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, tweets of mine about the competition or related to it (what print would you choose as your prize?) continued to generate retweets and traffic. The @happn_in_dublin campaign had finished so on Saturday I tweeted that there was 48 hours to go. Two retweets brought that message to 3000 tweeps. By now my followers had quadrupled. Traffic to my blog had doubled.

I closed the competition on Monday, announced the winners on Tuesday (and they tweeted about how happy they were to win, which was nice) and I’ll be sending them their framed prints shortly.

After the dust has settled

At the end of my 10 day campaign, I’ve seen my followers increase five fold, my blog readership is more than it was for all of June, and so heading for a 150% increase, my page-views per visitor count is well up, indicating new readers are visiting the blog and exploring it beyond the front page, and my RSS traffic is up.

In all, over the 10 day campaign, my tweets and the associated retweets went to about 18000 followers. As a comparison, @pixie recently remarked on their twitter page that 6 days into an advertising campaign on the Sunday Tribune website they were at 22,250 page impressions. Given how people view ads versus twitter retweets, I suspect my impressions were a much higher quality than theirs… but that’s just speculation.

Not for direct advertising

I must say at this juncture that although my @happn_in_dublin ad accounted for a good chunk of my twitter impressions, it didn’t drive proportionally anywhere near the same traffic as RTs from my followers and their followers. Which says to me that Twitter is not meant for blatant in your face advertising – it’s meant for real genuine word-of-mouth referrals that say: “I’ve looked at this and I found it interesting enough to point it your way”. Whether it’s a competition like I was running, or an article on something in the Irish Times, or anything in between, after a 10 day Twitter experiment I would have to agree with @damienmulley who tweeted, as I started my experiment, that:

everyone has influence [on Twitter] due to 2 letters: R and T

I’ll be continuing to use Twitter to not only promote by blog and my photography, but also to hopefully use my RT influence to promote the activities of others that I think are of interest and worthy of support.

Last December I agreed with the majority who left Twitter within a month. Today I reckon I’ll be staying with it for quite a while to come.

Comments welcome here or (just realised I haven’t comments set up on pages – just on posts) on my twitter page or by email.

PS: The numbers here are small, but bear in mind I started with 20 followers and a slow burning blog that is only just over 4 months old.