Originally posted on The Viral Garden
CopyBlogger has a post up on 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that Twitter is now the top referring site to my blog (roughly 13% of my traffic for 2009 comes from Twitter). And when I am active on Twitter and getting RTs, I usually pop up near the top of whatever list of ‘Top Retweeters’ you want to check.
So I have noticed a few things in addition to Dan’s list on getting RTs, that I think are working for me. Here’s some ways that I think my tweets are getting RTed.
1 – I have a lot of followers. Which means that more people are going to see my tweets, and that obviously increases the chances of getting RTs.
2 – I always link to my own blog posts while linking to other posts. This is done purposely. To me, it seems selfish to only link to my own content, and I see that as a ‘withdrawal’ that I am making on the capital I have with my followers. So to make up for that withdrawal, I also have to share valuable posts from OTHER people.
3 – Topic matters. If I link to any post concerning Twitter or Social Media, odds are much higher that it will be RTed. But this works both ways, not only for my posts, but for others. It trains me to help me see which topics my followers are interested in. So when I see another blogger writing about these topics, I link to them on Twitter.
4 – I often get requests from others to RT their post, and try to RT as many as I can. I’m happy to RT the posts as I can, I see it as my way of helping to ‘repay’ these people for RTing my links. And I think it makes the people whose tweets I RT, more likely to RT mine.
5 – I don’t purposely ‘try’ to get my links RTed. I’m not interested in having any of my tweets ‘go viral’, I just want to share valuable content with my friends. If I was just trying to get RTs, the way I used Twitter would change, and I’m not willing to do that.
Now I will say again that Twitter is the top referring site to this blog and I LOVE seeing the extra traffic. But…I want that traffic to be as a byproduct of my producing value for the people I interact with on Twitter, not because I am *trying* to get traffic. That’s an important distinction to make because if you start actively trying to push traffic to your blog from Twitter, you change the way you use Twitter. For me, letting the RTs happen organically works best.
Anyway, this is what seems to be working for me as far as getting my tweets RTed. What works for you?
