Step by Step: How We Increased Our Twitter Traffic by 165%

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10 seconds.

That’s how fast your tweets go from life to death.

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That’s why expert marketers tweet so much.

Take Sam Hurley for example, ranked #2 global digital marketer influencer.

He pushes out over 1K tweets a day (impressive, isn’t it?).

Now.

You don’t need to tweet that much,

But if you don’t play the game right, chances are your followers will never see your tweets.

And you sure don’t want to remain invisible to a crowd of over 300M active users that generate 1B unique monthly visits to sites from embedded tweets.

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The secret is: “automate the process, not the engagement” – Sam Hurley

That’s exactly what we did, and it helped us scale from 21 to 168 tweets per week and drive 165% more traffic from twitter.

Keep reading to learn the process and tools we used to make that happen.

10:4:1 – TWITTER SUCCESS FORMULA

The first rule of modern marketing is: don’t make it about you, keep it about your readers.

To stand out, you need to deliver value and engage your readers with content tailored to their needs and goals.

This rule applies to all of your marketing efforts, not just Twitter.

That’s why in the B2B Social Media Book, marketing experts Kipp Bodnar and Jeffery Cohen, coined the 10-4-1 rule.

“A ratio that serves as a guideline for the right balance of content to publish in social media. For every 15 of your social media updates, 10 should be pieces of other people’s content, 4 should be your own blog articles, and 1 should be a landing page.” – Hubspot

Why?

Because it means you’re being true to your readers.

Let me explain.

By sharing other writers’ content, you’re making the following statement.

This approach will help you in 2 ways:

You’ll provide your readers with a much more thorough content offer.
You’ll have the chance to build valuable relationships with fellow marketers and writers.

So: how can you follow the 10:4:1 rule without going crazy?

Just read the post, follow the process, have faith and results will come!

THE SECRET TO NEVER RUN OUT OF TWEETS

You need to post other writers’ content, period.

In this paragraph I’ll explain you what content to share, where to find it and how to organize it.

1 – What content you should share.

Whatever you share, it has to be relevant to or engaging for your readers, that’s a given.

However, this doesn’t mean all you can tweet about is content belonging to your business niche.

For instance, I write for marketers and share content about marketing, business, sales and so on.

Why?

Because being a marketer is not just about social media and landing pages.

You need to have a basic understanding of how your sales reps think, how a CS department works, and what the unit economics of your company are.

This will help you be more aware of how your company works, and in turn do a better job.

So, how do you know what content to share?

It all comes down to understanding your readers; to do that you need to develop a persona. If you don’t have one yet, this post will guide you through the process.

2 – Where you can find content.

There are endless sources you can use to find good content.

My personal choices are:

a) Feedly: a news aggregator I use to centralize my subscriptions to my favorite blogs. Here, 8 tips to use Feedly.

b) Inbound.org: a great marketing forum ideated by Rand Fishkin (Founder @ Moz) & Dharmesh Shah (Founder @ HubSpot), developed by Hubspot Labs.

c) Twitter lists: twitter’s newsfeed can get noisy at times, and to make sure I’m always on track of materials and news relevant to our readers, I use twitter lists.

I created different lists for different niches, which drastically simplified the research process.

Ps. did you notice I can manage multiple twitter accounts? I use Twitcher, check it out!

3 – How to organize your resources.

You may be wondering:

Alright, when I find a cool article, why can’t I just tweet it out?

Sure you can!

But:

a) In case you read multiple posts at a time, you don’t want to tweet them out all at once.

b) Once you tweet them, those articles will simply get lost in your twitter feed.

Stay with me.

As a content creator, you know how crucial it is to save great material you find over time.

You can then use it to find new content ideas, reference them in your posts, etc.

The point is:

Since you should be storing what you read, why not leverage your storing system for distribution?

It’s quite simple.

All you need is:

A pocket account
Zapier
The Twitter Library

Every time I read a great piece of content I “pocket it” using the chrome extension, and if I think it’s something relevant to our followers, I use the tag “read”.

This tag will trigger Zapier, which will store the article in the Twitter Library, a spreadsheet to store third parties’ content I want to tweet about.

The Twitter Library is sheet number 4 in the Tweets Multiplier spreadsheet.

Keep reading to know more about the Tweets Multiplier and how to use it in combination with the Distribution Map.

5X YOUR TWEETS WITH THE TWEETS MULTIPLIER

Once you have enough third party content to share, it’s time to distribute your own content:

Your blog
Your reach materials / lead magnets
Your product (promotional tweets)

Each type of tweet will appeal to a different segment of your followers, so that you cover all the sections of your marketing funnel.

Keeping in mind the 10:4:1 rule, tweets about your blog and lead magnets fall under the “4”, while promotional tweets count as “1”.

As mentioned, your tweet’s life span is incredibly short (<10 seconds), and if you want your followers to find your content, you need to get creative and craft multiple tweets for each post, lead magnet and product page you want to distribute.

Does it sound like a lot of work?

It’s not!

Work smarter, not harder and use what you already have:

1 – Your subheads: if you’re writing your subheads right, they’ll make killer tweets. Check out this post to learn how to improve your subheads.

2 – Excerpts from your content: data, statistics or impactful statements work great as tweets.

3 – Your pages copy

But, it’s a hell lot of tweets, where can I manage them?!

No worries, that’s what the Tweets Multiplier is for.

The Tweet Multiplier is a google spreadsheet template you can use to brainstorm and save all your tweets.

It’s made of 5 sheets:

Blog: to store tweets about anything that lives in your blog (posts, infographics)
Lead Magnets: tweets about ebooks, guides, webinars.
Promotional: tweets about your product.
Library: tweets about third parties content (see previous paragraph)
Backlinks: tweets about materials that link to your site.

Keep the process going for a while and over time you’ll have an immense repository of tweets to reuse anytime.

As we’ll see in the next section, the last step is moving your tweets into the Distribution Map.

One last note.

To improve the quality and results of your tweets, make sure you always keep track of the results.

Spend a little time at the end of the week to find your top performing tweets.

This will help you improve your communication and style.

There are tons of metrics you could measure (buffer article), but let’s keep it simple for now and focus on likes, clicks and retweets.

Check out this guide to to learn the science behind great tweets.

SCHEDULE 168 TWEETS IN 5 MINUTES WITH THE DISTRIBUTION MAP

The Twitter Distribution Map is the pumping heart of your twitter distribution machine.

distribution map

It’s where all your tweets converge and makes sure you keep your twitter feed full of great content, without being repetitive and respecting the 10:4:1 rule.

Here’s how I use it.

The vertical axes measures hours, while the horizontal measures days.

We literally built it around a 24/7 schedule: 24 tweets a day, 7 days a week. But you can adapt it to your own schedule.

Time-slots are color coded.

Different colors correspond to different types of tweets.

At the end of the week, simply copy/paste the tweets you saved in the Tweets Multiplier.

And within minutes, you’ll end up with 168 unique tweets pointing to third party content, your blog, your landing pages and your product.

Easy, isn’t it?

Last step is, of course, is posting.

Which, thanks to the map, can be done in minutes with any social media management tool.

As for us, we’ve centralized the entire content marketing process on our content marketing platform, and we use it for management, creation and distribution.

BONUS: HOW TO USE AUTOMATION WITHOUT SOUNDING LIKE A ROBOT

Great, you now have the keys to build your twitter distribution machine.

But, wait a minute.

There’s one last piece of advice.

Everyone loves automation.

Still, either offline and online we want to connect with humans, not machines.

Case in point:

Don’t make people think your twitter handle is managed by a robot!

Here’s how.

1 – Bring emotions to the table: sometimes, ditch business related content and leave room for tweets that show your company’s personality.

Tweet content that inspires, engages and entertains: like quotes, powerful stories and pictures of cats (everyone wants to have a laugh from time to time!).

Your readers are not machines, but real people with interests, passions and emotions. Connect with them.

Personas help you connect with your readers on a deeper level. Learn how to build yours here.

2 – Go Manual (sometimes): spend some time engaging with your followers, influencers, people and brands you admire.

Like, retweet, comment.

Each of these actions are a step towards building meaningful relationships that can end up in partnerships, business opportunities or even a beer!

For instance, I reached out to Wilson mentioning that I used his article on SumoMe blog and asked for feedback.

Not only did he engage with my tweet, but replied and retweeted my post. (Thanks again, Wilson!)

3 – Be plain honest about it: automation is part of our lives, period.

You’re tweeting 1000 times a day?

Cool! As long as you filter what you tweet.

I’ve never heard anyone complaining about “too much good content”.

You’re automating DMs to new followers?

That’s fine! Just be honest about it.

For instance, I took inspiration from the geniuses behind WaitButWhy, and crafted a DM based on their lead capturing message.

Some may not even read it, some will have a laugh but I doubt someone will get pissed because of it.

CONCLUSIONS

So you learned how to 10X your twitter feed while keeping it fresh and authentic.

All you need to do now is download the templates and start executing.

Click the image below to access:

1 – The Twitter Distribution Map

2 – The Tweets Multiplier

3 – A pdf with the entire process in bullet points.

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